T
he Chinese people have stood up.... Ours will no longer be
a nation subject to insult and humiliation,”^1 Chairman Mao
Zedong proclaimed upon his arrival in Beijing in the autumn
of 1949. The Chinese Communist Party had risen to power on three
converging currents of public opinion: (1) Chinese nationalism that had
been building since the Opium Wars; (2) class resentment, mainly of
peasants against landlords; and (3) growing frustration shared by all
classes over the corruption, incompetence, and fi nancial collapse of the
Nationalist government. As the civil war had begun in earnest in 1947,
the Communist Party had changed its tactics in vast stretches of coun-
tryside under its control. No longer feeling any need for a united front
of all social classes against the Japanese enemy, the Party launched a
violent rural revolution.
In the wake of the rapid victories of the People’s Liberation Army,
Communist Party work teams now spread over the entire nation,
extending to the remotest villages, to organize peasants, recruit lead-
ers, and categorize everyone as poor, middle-class, or rich peasants or
as landlords. In public “struggle sessions,” peasants denounced land-
lords and pressured them to confess their past crimes and give up their
land and property. These struggle sessions served to humiliate all the
members of the rural upper classes and to destroy the prestige they
had enjoyed in the past. Gradually, from 1949 to 1957, all the land in
China was “collectivized,” or put under the supervision of cooperatives
called “production teams.” Individual families were allowed to keep
small plots of land for their own use, though the sum of these “private
plots” could not exceed 10 percent of the total land held by the produc-
tion team, which usually consisted of all the members of one village.
The land was worked collectively, and the state took 5 to 10 percent
of the grain production as a tax. Each family received a portion of the
chapter 9