Month / May 2020

by Andrew

Xi Zhongxun’s failed attempt to moderate land reform

There are not too many sympathetic figures to be found in the waves of violence that swept the Chinese countryside during the Communist Party’s early pursuit of land reform, the subject of the Tulane historian Brian DeMare’s new book Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution. But one of them was Xi Zhongxun, now best known as the father of current Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The elder Xi’s frequent disagreement with how the Party pursued land reform is known thanks to a major collection of documents published in 1988 (for internal distribution) by the National Defense University, one of the major sources on which DeMare draws.

Land reform–the forced redistribution of rural land from the rich to the poor–was central to the peasant-centered revolutionary strategy developed by Mao Zedong. He had formed his ideas on it by 1927, in investigating the peasant movement in his home province of Hunan. From the start, Mao conceived of the process as a violent confrontation between oppressed peasants and rich landlords, in which landlords were publicly attacked and humiliated before having their assets stripped from them. But Mao could not put this vision into practice while the Communist Party was in its United Front with the Nationalists to fight the Japanese invasion.

As that alliance started to break down into civil in 1945-46, Mao began to focus on radical land reform as a way to bring the peasantry onto his side. DeMare’s book is structured around the standardized process that the Communist work teams followed as they fanned out across the countryside: identifying disaffected elements within each village, labeling other residents of the village as class enemies, then organizing public confrontation and “struggle” sessions in which the “landlords” were humiliated and forced to admit guilt and give up their assets.

The resulting mob violence resulted in widespread torture, sexual assault and murder: “According to the party’s own accounting, in 1947 alone some 250,000 rich peasants and landlords were killed in the land reform campaigns of North China.” (Frank Dikötter’s chapter “The Hurricane,” in his The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957, is a short history that vividly conveys the violence of land reform; see my post from 2018 for some more discussion).

Yet not all Communist Party leaders approved of the violent and often arbitrary score-settling that took place under the name of land reform. DeMare notes that the peak of the violence coincided with a January 1948 speech by Ren Bishi, a party theoretician, calling for a more nuanced approach to land reform and redressing errors. Around the same time, the elder Xi also intervened to try change the approach:

As mass violence threatened to derail agrarian revolution in early 1948, some party leaders began to speak out against land reform struggle. In the Northwest, Xi Zhongxun noted how activists had falsely created landlords, resulting in “manufactured struggle.” Campaigns that appeared spontaneous had in fact been jump-started by impure elements with dubious motivations. Activists in one poor peasant league, for example, had threatened to stone villagers to death if they did not take part in struggle; elsewhere, a work team ordered the local militia to string up landlords and beat village cadres. …

Writing personally to Mao, Xi was unflinching in his description of the extremes of rural revolution. In five days of land reform in Shaanxi’s Jia County, hooligans drowned victims in vats of salt water; they also poured boiling oil over the heads of struggle targets, burning them to death. Local cadres and their families were strung up and beaten in the search for wealth. Struggle even spread to a school for party children. There, teachers and students as young as seven years old were singled out as landlord running dogs. While these events were rare, Xi argued that they deeply affected rural society: peasants were so afraid they did not even dare to bury the dead. …

Xi even dared to question Mao’s assumptions about rural classes. Noting that middle peasants were already the dominant class in the Northwest, Xi argued that many of those who remained poor were in fact lazy. Putting these peasants in charge of land reform had resulted in chaos.

The worry was that the excesses of land reform were costing the Party valuable support during the civil war. By the middle of 1948, land reform was mostly put on hold, in favor of a return to an earlier, more moderate and reasonably successful policy of “double reduction”–negotiating lower rents and interest payments for farmers. But as the Communist Party approached victory over the Nationalists in 1949, land reform went back on the agenda.

The largest round of land reform came in 1950, when the Party recruited hundreds of thousands of people for “work teams” that would fan out through the countryside to reorganize rural villages. The Land Reform Law of that year was intended to correct some of the previous excesses of previous rounds of land reform, and DeMare goes out of his way to mention examples of peaceful, more legally restrained land reform in Shunyi, outside Beijing, and in Zhejiang. But the Party never abandoned the idea that land reform was fundamentally a violent struggle, and so violence continued.

For the party, any attempt to avoid struggle was unacceptable. Xi Zhongxun, long skeptical of struggle in the countryside, remained a true outlier. Reporting to Mao Zedong on the final stages of land reform in his Northwest Bureau, Xi once again found himself arguing against Mao’s grand narrative of rural revolution. Accepting the centrality of releasing the masses and struggle for raising class consciousness, Xi nevertheless insisted that the party not abandon leadership of land reform. Xi instructed the forty thousand cadres and activists under his direction to mobilize poor and middle peasants together, so that they might use “speak reason” struggle and prohibit “chaotic beatings.” …. Xi proposed embracing peaceful land reform, at least for the moment.

But Xi was a rare voice, and even he made concessions to Mao’s vision by arguing that this peaceful approach would “numb the enemy” and facilitate an eventual strategic attack on the landlord class. …Fierce struggle was essential to land reform and Mao’s grand vision of rural revolution. For the many who may have found such violence abhorrent, Chinese intellectuals were ready to provide a theoretical justification of class struggle.

DeMare includes quotes supporting the harsh approach to land reform from figures as eminent as Deng Xiaoping himself and the rural-policy specialist Du Runsheng, both of whom would be lionized a generation later for their roles in the rural reform of the 1980s. The land reform of the 1950s was less a prequel to that success than a violent political campaign that laid the groundwork for even more violent political campaigns: the collectivization of agriculture later in the 1950s, and then the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. The violent, extralegal “struggle sessions” that the Cultural Revolution made famous were modeled on those used during land reform.

The elder Xi’s attempts to push back against excesses and pursue more humane policies show what type of leader he was, even if those attempts were ultimately unsuccessful (and probably contributed to his being purged in 1962). That strength of character helps explain why there has always been such enormous goodwill visible toward him in China. As do his later contributions: after Xi was rehabilitated in 1978 and appointed to leadership roles in Guangdong, he played a key role in liberalizing the economy. That reservoir of goodwill also undoubtedly fed into the optimism that initially greeted the ascension of his son to the leadership.

by Andrew

Why China isn’t sending money to everyone

Global crises are revealing. How different countries are responding to the Covid-19 pandemic can tell us a lot about how their systems function. One of the most interesting differences is in how governments are offsetting the economic damage caused by extended lockdowns. Unprecedented reductions in economic activity have led many countries to rapidly adopt unprecedented policies, such as direct relief payments to households, or government grants to companies to cover worker salaries. These measures have been derided as “socialism” by some of their critics. But China, an actual socialist country, has not used them: it has not delivered any kind of broad-based grants to households. Why?

The reason clearly has nothing to do with Chinese culture, Confucian philosophy, Asian values, or whatever. In late February, the indubitably Chinese territory of Hong Kong became the first government to announce a direct cash payment: a HK$10,000 handout to every adult Hong Kong resident. And it has since announced a program to subsidize 50% of wages for employers who pledge not to lay off workers. Despite having this example close at hand, mainland China has not done anything comparable.

It’s not for lack of ideas. A number of prominent Chinese economists have advocated income support measures. Liu Shijin, the former head of the State Council’s Development Research Center, has advocated giving low-income workers a month’s worth of wages. Yao Yang, the dean of the National School of Development, has called for giving 2,000 renminbi to every household earning less than half the median income.

Yet the best time to deploy those measures may have passed. As Yu Yongding, an well-known independent economist, has pointed out, China is already over the worst of the epidemic and many of its restraints on movement and daily life have been lifted. It seems unlikely that China would copy policies that Western governments used in the most urgent phase of their outbreaks when its own situation is no longer quite so severe. While there is still an ongoing debate about the next stage of China’s economic-policy response, the first wave of decisions about how to respond to an emergency have already been made. It is telling that universal or near-universal relief for household incomes was not one of the tools China reached for.

One reason some have given for this decision is simply fiscal conservatism: universal income support costs a lot of money, which China can ill afford. Jia Kang, the former head of the Ministry of Finance’s in-house think tank, is one of the most prominent figures publicly arguing against direct income support:

For China, given that our our per-capita fiscal resources are still very low, and that the fiscal situation is very right, to give money to everyone–Jack Ma gets some, I get some, you get some–is really not necessary. …There are many places where we need to spend money, and China has to be careful with its spending. If I were allowed to make suggestions, I would take this plan of distributing money to every person off the table. It would be better for the government to focus on helping low-income and vulnerable groups while keeping appropriate control of spending.

In more recent remarks, Jia expanded on this theme, arguing that the government should not issue debt just to support short-term household consumption. Rather, it should use its fiscal resources on infrastructure and grand projects that will help China’s economy develop over the longer term. The best way of supporting household income growth, he argued, is to ensure that China is on a sustainable development trajectory and not stuck in the middle-income trap.

Jia is an effective spokesman for a brand of fiscal conservatism very widespread in Chinese official circles. But this fiscal conservatism is not of the sort found in right-wing Western political parties, which emphasizes restraint on government spending so that households can keep more of their money and decide how to spend it themselves. The Chinese version is rather a kind of government-knows-best conservatism. The reason the state needs to be conservative with its resources is so that it can use them to develop the economy in the best way, as only the state is capable of determining.

In fact, this is a very typical Chinese socialist way of thinking. It’s a caricature to think that socialism is just about maximizing the delivery of state benefits to households. Deng Xiaoping talked about achieving common prosperity for everyone, but through state-led development and growth rather than social welfare payments. Even at the apex of Stalinist high socialism in the 1950s and 1960s, China’s social welfare system was not astonishingly generous. State benefits were originally provided only to workers in urban state-owned enterprises, a minority of the population. Those workers were treated better because they were working in the core industrial sectors given priority in economic development plans. Relative prices were set to funnel any surplus from agriculture, where the majority of the population earned their living, into the development of heavy industry.

Chinese planners today have a much broader conception of strategic sectors than just coal and steel, and appreciate the virtues of market pricing. But their producer bias, the tendency to favor production over consumption, is still present. China is also notable for still having a fairly regressive system tax system that does relatively little redistribution. The social benefits provided by the Chinese state are more of a combination of programs for specific groups than broad, universal guarantees. They have evolved out of the narrow benefits provided to socialism’s privileged class of state workers, and are based on careful distinctions rather than an equalizing ideology. The means-testing for China’s minimum-income support program (dibao) is famously strict.

Of course, the socialist tradition also contains powerful themes of equality and the state’s responsibility for its citizens, and these have been periodically mobilized to put pressure on China’s government to expand its provision of social welfare. Yet the inequality between privileged urban workers and their rural compatriots has been an enduring feature of Chinese society for decades, one that has only been exacerbated by the disruptions of Covid-19. Judged by actual practice rather than rhetoric, producer bias has been a much more enduring theme in Chinese socialism than generous redistribution.

These historical legacies are not immutable, and received ideas are not a prison. Since late April, China’s government has stepped up its rhetoric about helping those people suffering from the economic disruption brought by the coronavirus outbreak, and it has pledged to expand access to existing programs that provide benefits to unemployed and low-income people. It’s still possible that the government could decide to offer much more broad-based support to household incomes than it has so far. Nonetheless, China has clearly moved more slowly and reluctantly in this direction than many other countries.

I think it would be a mistake to interpret this reluctance as a sign that China is now more capitalist than the capitalists, or more right-wing than the Republicans. Rather, the pandemic is once again revealing how its socialist legacy is still very much alive.