In Manchuria (37 page)

In the New World, after two years of food shortages at Plymouth, the Pilgrims abandoned communal farming in
1623
. Each of the settlement’s households tended its own plot and kept whatever it grew. People worked harder than before, with women and children joining men in the field. The colony never starved again.

China’s experiment in collective agriculture lasted nearly three decades before—as Auntie Yi put it—unhappy people changed it.

The policies introduced by the Communist Party after Liberation in
1949
winnowed individual farmers into groups. In
1954
, after an estimated
800
,
000
landlords were executed for being “counterrevolutionaries,” their land was redistributed to farmers. Auntie Yi’s memory of the Land Reform Policy announcement was eating the canned beef and lamb seized from landlords: it was the first time she had tasted the meats. Two years later China effectively abolished private land ownership, and farmers were organized into
790
,
000
agricultural cooperatives. Auntie Yi suspected that the former landlords’ holdings were simply repainted as co-ops; the numbers nearly matched. The Party called its agrarian restructuring “hammering while the iron is hot,” aimed at preventing the reemergence of the gentry.

Rice was first widely planted in Wasteland then. As we sat on her
kang
, Auntie Yi started to recount how the paddies were made before another thought interrupted the story. “Did you notice that the song ‘On the Songhua River’ mentions the Northeast’s forests and coal and sorghum and soybeans, but no rice?”

The lyrics detailed more than Japanese occupation. They also memorialized a vanished landscape. “It’s interesting,” she said, after belting out a verse. “There’s hardly any sorghum planted anymore, and more broad beans than soy, and the forest has mostly been chopped down, and not much coal is mined as before.”

Uncle Fu looked away from the televised snooker to add, “Now the song would be about petroleum, corn, and rice.”

“It was really hard to open the paddies, though,” Auntie Yi said, picking up her previous thread. “We all helped out. We used a horse and sled to turn over the soil, then wore wooden shoes to flatten it, all of us walking back and forth, back and forth. Once the land started to be improved, more and more people were moved here. Our agriculture progressed from a ‘beginning collective’ to a ‘mutual help collective’ in
1955
. It was for people classified as poor, lower, or middle peasants—not the rich peasants who had hired laborers or owned a bit of their own land. They were excluded, and reeducated.”

That last word always sent a chill down my spine, but Auntie Yi was a true believer, and said it with pride. I asked what
mutual help
meant.

“If you have a horse, but I have more laborers in my family, we would exchange: your horse would turn over the soil with a plow, and my family would help you plant and harvest. That changed into the big commune, when we all ate together in a canteen, and when everyone had to bring their hoes and other tools to keep in the yard for anyone to use. We gave our wardrobe to make a table for the canteen. Wasteland became a village then.”

“Nineteen fifty-six,” I said reflexively, quoting the village stone. By
1958
, all of China’s co-ops had become “people’s communes.” The policy triggered the Great Famine, killing at least
20
million people; some estimates go as high as
45
million. Officially, the deaths were blamed on natural disasters, and the period was labeled the Three Years of Bitterness.

“All our personal food was confiscated during the collective times,” Auntie Yi said. “We used to grind soybeans mixed with barley in secret at home. Everything was supposed to be for the commune. We didn’t even have money. We were paid in work points. At the end of each workday, you had your score assessed and entered into a little handbook for each family. It was casually decided, actually. It wasn’t a true commune: whoever had the power to decide the score earned the most points, or rewarded his family and friends. You knew the standard. If you did hard labor, people would murmur, ‘Give him six points.’ If it was really hard work, you could earn up to ten, even twelve. But the ‘rich peasants’ could only earn up to eight, and every night they would be reminded it was because they had exploited people in the past. That was our family, you know: my grandfather hired people after he migrated here on foot, starting out hauling grain on his back. And my father ran a granary out here. So I was marked. But really, I was lucky. The people who collaborated with the Japanese in Manchukuo got it the worst. Then you had to sit and eat together after all the points talk! You could have points deducted, too, if you didn’t work or made mistakes. There’s a saying that proves it:
dao zhao ba fen’r
—you work a whole year and end up owing eight points.”

I said that I would not have lasted long.

“You would have talked too much and said the wrong things,” she said, swatting my arm in a mock scolding. Then she became a cadre again: “Mostly I hated the points from an administrative standpoint. The system wasn’t fair. By the time we got to ‘advanced-level collectives’ in the
1960
s on our road to achieve socialism, we had a good village secretary. But of course he got transferred elsewhere, and we had to start over with new leaders.”

That system remained. To advance in the Communist Party was not to stay in one post, like an American mayor working toward reelection, but to do well in one place, then get shuffled up a rung on the portfolio ladder: village to county, county to city, city to province, and so on.        

“Whenever we had too much pork,” Auntie Yi said, “they transferred that out, too.”

It wasn’t a saying. Memories often looped back to food. Uncle Fu stood up and, as he made for the kitchen, said I was staying for dinner. He made flash-fried garlic stems and pork over rice. “Eat,” he urged me, even after my third bowl. “You haven’t eaten enough. You’re not full. Eat. Eat. Eat.”

When Chairman Mao died in
1976
, so did his dream of collective agriculture. By decade’s end, farmers were allowed a small, personal plot to supplement crops raised by the village team. The work points system was abolished. “But at every turn, people were unhappy!” Auntie Yi said. “It’s in people’s nature to complain. But very few people complained when
da baogan
was introduced.”

The term meant “the complete allocation of responsibilities,” and the policy meant that individuals, like the hungry Pilgrims, no longer had to farm as a team. The change was born not in a ministerial meeting but in a farmer’s home in the central China province of Anhui, where
The Good Earth
had been set. A corn-growing village named Xiaogang was starving, suffering under the nation’s quota demands. Its residents dug up roots, boiled poplar leaves with salt, and ground roasted tree bark into flour. Entire families left their thatched-roof, mud-walled homes and took to the road to beg.

A farmer named Yan Hongchang, whose studies had ended at middle school, was the deputy leader of the village work team, overseeing production. But there was no production that autumn of
1978
. During the Great Famine, a quarter of the county’s residents had died. “We knew what it was like to starve, and we would rather die any other way,” Mr. Yan later recalled.

On the night of November
24
, Mr. Yan summoned the heads of the village’s twenty families to a secret meeting. The village accountant was deputized as a secretary, and on paper torn from a child’s school exercise book transcribed a seventy-nine-word pledge to divide the commune’s land into family plots, submit the required quota of corn to the state, and keep the rest for themselves. “In the case of failure,” the document concluded, “we are prepared for death or prison, and other commune members vow to raise our children until they are eighteen years old.” The farmers signed the document and affixed their fingerprints.

Thus began China’s rural reform.

Today a large stone monument to the pact greets tourists to the village. But in the spring of
1979
, a local official who learned of the clandestine agreement fumed that the group had “dug up the cornerstone of socialism” and threatened severe punishment. Thinking he was bound for a labor camp, Mr. Yan rose before dawn, reminded his wife that their fellow villagers had promised to help raise their children, and walked to the office of the county’s party secretary. But the man privately admitted to Mr. Yan that he knew, since the pact had been signed, the village’s winter harvest had increased sixfold. The official told Mr. Yan he would protect Xiaogang village and the rebellious farmers so long as their experiment didn’t spread.

Villagers gossip; farmers talk about their fields. Soon neighboring hamlets copied Xiaogang’s model. News reached the provincial authorities, who were unwilling to punish farms that were, at last, producing food. Thus, they did not brand the abandonment of collective farming as counterrevolutionary but instead endorsed it as “an irresistible wave spontaneously topping the limits once enforced by the state.”

In Beijing, three years after Chairman Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping was opening China to foreign trade and liberalizing the economy. Yet originally he ruled against allowing “household farms,” afraid that critics would again label him a “capitalist roader,” for which he had been purged during the Cultural Revolution. However, the grassroots movement that began in Xiaogang made the decision for him. In a series of policies issued between
1978
and
1984
, China formalized the Household Contract Responsibility System (colloquially called
chengbao
). It allowed families to farm their own allocation of land in exchange for turning a portion of their crops over to the state. What remained was theirs to eat, and to sell at unregulated prices. China’s communes, brigades, and production teams were renamed as townships, villages, and hamlets, respectively.

Xiaogang was made into a living patriotic education base where a small museum displays a replica of the farmers’ pact, since the original was lost. Exhibits praise the bold wisdom of its ringleader, Yan Hongchang, his cosignatories, and the Party. But not everyone bought the high rhetoric. “My father signed that paper because we were starving,” Mr. Yan’s son told me. “There was nothing heroic about it. He had no other choice. It was human instinct, trying not to die. It’s strange the leaders want to celebrate survival.”

The reforms continued: in
1984
, fifteen-year leases were introduced for family farm plots—then extended to thirty years in
1993
. The state stopped requiring grain procurement in
2001
and abolished all agricultural taxes in
2006
.

Auntie Yi supported these changes. “But now people are unhappy here again. Why? Because it’s not about farmland. It’s our individual houses. I don’t want to be a tenant of Eastern Fortune Rice.”

“You’ll own the apartment.”

“But they’re making me move. It’s just a new landlord.”

We stood in the July sun on the side of Red Flag Road, watching workers slather golden yellow paint on her house. “There’s an inspection coming, now we can be certain,” Auntie Yi said. “Whenever the garbage is collected from the side of the road and it’s swept, that’s when you know someone big is coming. This time they built a new road. How interesting.” Three hundred yards ahead, a temporary fence went up at the dirt-road turnoff to San Jiu’s house. A call to Frances taught me a new Chinese word:
po’te jin cun
. Potemkin village.

“The land distribution and how we farm it has changed over the years here,” Auntie Yi said. “But our houses never did. We lived in one place. The homes themselves improved from mud to cement, but that’s all. Your mom”—my mother-in-law—“and wife grew up where San Jiu lives.”

She repeated her complaints. If you gave up your home and accepted an apartment, it became part of the collective, which would demolish it and lease the plot to Eastern Fortune for planting. The company would contract to pay an annual rent for the land you previously farmed. “But farmers don’t just sell the rice. We eat it, and burn the stalks to heat the
kang
. In an apartment, we’ll have to pay for heat. Now, the company said they won’t charge for heat the first three years. That’s deceptive. Do you expect to be alive three years from now? Yes? You’ll have to pay for heat then. We’ll lose our vegetable gardens, our chickens—we’ll become dependent on the company. Our house will be razed; there will be no going back.”

Using rollers, the painters buttered her home.

“It looks nice.”

“I have an idea,” she said, ignoring my comment. “If we really want to know what Eastern Fortune’s plans are, you should walk in there and tell the boss that you want to buy the company. See if the price includes the office buildings, the greenhouses, the hot spring, and so on. Ask about the land: how much is under contract now, and how much the company expects to control.”

I gestured at my mud-covered legs, frayed shorts, musty hoodie, and thick beard.