Tragedy of a Chinese Agrarian Reformer:

...Many non-Communist leaders in free Asia and elsewhere can learn much from the mistakes of such a genuine agrarian reformer as H. T. Fei...

...Significantly, the Chinese Communists were quick to accept the Soviet Ersatz theory, which, denying the reality of a specific and stationary state-dominated "Asiatic" order, claims that in China, as in Europe, society was dominated by private owners, at first by slave-owners and later by feudal landlords...

...These ideas suggest that they were influenced by socialist concepts...

...Japan's comprehensive land reform, which was initiated under the American Occupation, made the majority of all Japanese peasants the owners of their land...

...Taking as his main theme the character of China's traditional society, a subject which he had only touched upon in his earlier books, he made it very clear—clearer than in his article, "Peasantry and Gentry," published in 1946—that on this central issue his views differed profoundly from those of the Communists...

...Redfield found that few of Fei's students had "read a line of Marx...

...Obviously, then, the historical situation was still open...

...In contrast to Mao's dishonest "reform," the Japanese reform is there to stay, and its results are remarkable...

...But it was not at all in keeping with his own point of view...

...Redfield tells us, Fei reached this momentous conclusion when, in Communist broadcasts, he recognized the voices of old friends and former students...

...Nor did he want a big, concentrated industry...

...What was happening in the villages of the non-Communist Far East he could know only through the foreign publications to which, as a fairly prominent official, he had access—and, of course, through foreign broadcasts...

...After the war ended, Dr...

...He was still there in 1948, when the Communists with increasing success turned their weapons against Chiang Kai-shek...

...Rumor has it that Mao directed Fei to stop busying himself with the ticklish gentry question and the villages he knew so well...

...Herein lies the function of social science...

...A UN survey lists spectacular changes: The peasants have a higher income...

...By fair means and foul, the Communists "urged" the peasants to pool their labor in mutual-aid teams and their land in producers' cooperatives...

...Manifestly, Fei was closer to Gandhi than to Marx and Lenin when, in 1939, he exhorted China to avoid the errors of Western economic centralization...

...Rumor also has it that he was assigned to less sensitive ethnological work and placed on various Government boards and committees...

...This argument might have been invoked with seeming justification by Fei's escapist colleagues...

...He failed his country...

...If any spark of his early devotion to the peasantry remains, he must be stirred by the land reforms that have recently been accomplished in Formosa and Japan...

...And they were quick to deprive the peasants of the fruits of their toil...

...But he was neither arrested nor killed...

...In 1950, consumption in the cities, which immediately after the war was very low, again reached 70 per cent of the prewar level...

...and the campaign for collectivization ("cooperatization") was enormously stepped up in the winter of 1953-54...

...Clearly, Fei had never seriously concerned himself with the problems of Communism, and his students were no better prepared than he for the coming of the Communists...

...He could observe the "dialectical" character of an agrarian policy that was slanted in one direction during the struggle for power and in another after this struggle had reached a successful conclusion...

...The experts generally ascribe this change to the land-reform policy of the Nationalist Government...

...In any event, we should carefully examine his case so that, under comparable circumstances, we will not repeat his mistakes...

...they use better farm implements and more fertilizer...

...Had Fei and opinion-makers like him in China?and in the United States—understood the issues better, the China story might have had another ending...

...To him, the Chinese Communists were essentially Chinese...

...they sell more and they live better...

...According to Dr...

...But Fei and his co-author, Chih-i Chang, held that this would be highly undesirable, because China would thus be following the Western pattern "as Russia did after World War I." The authors of Earthbound China hoped for the coming of a "cooperative world order," and they believed that "a large organization which will coordinate the small manufacturing units is necessary for the new rural industry of China...

...Under the direction of Vice President Chen Cheng, and with the advice of Wolf Ladejinsky, the Formosan land reform proceeded so successfully that Chester Bowles, who visited Formosa after his return from India, called it "a model for every free country in Asia...

...In his first book, Peasant Life in China, published in London in 1939, he applied insights gained from these and other non-Marxist teachers to his analysis of Chinese village life...

...His recently published book, China's Gentry (Chicago, $5.75), demonstrates clearly what his earlier publications suggested: the desire not only to analyze but also to improve the conditions of the Chinese peasants...

...As in 1939, he saw the future of the Chinese village definitely linked to an improved peasant economy...

...The differences between these developments and the fate of the peasants under Mao's regime are striking...

...Fei could see these developments with his own e\es...

...Karl A. Wittfogel (cut at left) is Director of the Chinese History Project sponsored by the University of Washington and Columbia University...

...mass suicides, caused by unbearable taxation, occurred in many villages in the spring of 1953...

...He also kept insisting that, during this period, societal leadership was based not on strong landed property but on strong state power...

...In 1953, it rose to 125 per cent...

...But after they had established and consolidated their dictatorial government, they changed both their policy and their timetable...

...They mentioned collectivization infrequently, and then only as the program of a remote future...

...Here is the story of one Chinese experience which should carry a sober warning to the new moral leaders of free Asia...

...Thus, a few years after the Communists began to distribute the land to the peasants on a huge scale, they are taking it away from them on an equally huge scale...

...And even more urgently: "An inaccurate definition of situation, either due to deliberate aberrations or to ignorance, is dangerous for a group because it may lead to an undesired future...

...Fei stopped writing to his friends immediately after the Communists seized power, and his statements since that time do not necessarily express his true feelings...

...To mention but one example: Sun Yat-sen, who allied himself with the Communists only at the very end of his life and even then rejected both their diagnosis and their therapy, pleaded for land reform during the greater part of his career...

...Soon he was singled cut for an unusual honor: Mao Tse-tung talked with him face to face...

...in certain respects, the Chinese nationalist and revolutionary movements pre-dated those of southern Asia by two decades...

...Nor did he want a Communist revolution...

...He did justice to a handful of villages...

...And General Douglas MacArthur, whose basically conservative outlook is beyond question, came to understand the urgency of the land issue better than many professing radicals...

...As an official of the new regime, Dr...

...but, unlike many similarly educated Chinese, he was not a Marxist-Leninist...

...They well define the intellectual responsibility underlying any serious political issue and the moral responsibility of the social scientist who, through ignorance, leads those whom he wants to help "to an undesired future...

...In contrast to all state socialists, he did not recommend the nationalization of agriculture...

...In many eases, revised land assessments caused more hardship than the formal lax rales indicate...

...While Fei was impressed by the "land reform" which the Chinese Communists had initiated in Kiangsi Province, he did not believe that the Chinese peasants were attracted to Communism as such...

...However, despite his decidedly non-Communist views, Fei the agrarian reformer praised the Communists' "New Democracy" once they were in power...

...In the villages, consumption in 1950 reached 93.5 per cent of the prewar level...

...peasant resistance to the enforced grain purchases was brutally broken in November 1953...

...For Fei, the Chinese gentry comprised three groups: retired officials, relatives of officials, and educated landlords...

...They are transforming the independent small peasants into poorly paid and unprotected agrarian laborers...

...Redfield, who left the city only a few weeks before the Communists seized it, Fei translated and rewrote his essays on the gentry while "Peking was ringed by Communist forces and the fall of the universities and of the city itself was expected within a very short time...

...His friends feared for his safety...

...Having known him personally, I consider it more than likely that he fully comprehends the tragic bankruptcy of his career as an agrarian reformer...

...Are genuine agrarian reformers like Fei, who are still living on the China mainland, capable of understanding this...

...Indeed, he urged a "reasonable and effective land reform," which, because it would improve the lot of the peasants, would eliminate the conditions for rural revolt...

...Obviously, Fei's skill and prestige were worth exploiting...

...they are improving their farming techniques...

...Redfield (who revised and edited the American edition) "hastily, with enthusiasm, and in tense anticipation of the coming of Communist control...

...for, from the standpoint of the Communist system of power and privilege, no concept that by implication views a managerial bureaucracy as the ruling class can be tolerated...

...During World War II, Fei spent a number of years in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province...

...Fei made not the slightest concession to this contrived developmental scheme...

...He certainly knew that his was no Marxist-Leninist position, but nevertheless he thought that he would be able to work with the Communists...

...This is understandable...

...But even if the chances for a non-Communist solution of the Chinese crisis were smaller than I, for one, believe, a critical reappraisal of recent Chinese developments remains crucial...

...Many of the experiences they are now undergoing were confronted by Chinese intellectuals in the previous years of this century...

...Teng Tzu-hui, the head of the Communist parly's rural work, noted with pride that by 1958 the pooling of labor and land might be "basically" completed "in the major agricultural districts throughout the country...

...During the first phase, the Communists stressed the redistribution of the land as a sure way of benefiting the peasants as small producers, and they said nothing about burdens that might be imposed...

...English social scientists pioneered in the critical appraisal of rural India...

...According to the Communist press, the "blind flow" of discontented peasants to the cities began before the completion of the land reform in 1952...

...Although Marx's adherence to the classical concept of Oriental despotism was a complicating factor, the Soviet leaders succeeded in obscuring, and eventually discarding, this dangerous interpretation...

...Hsiao-tung Fei was neither the head of a political party nor a general entrusted with the reorganization of a defeated country...

...In a postwar world dominated by power politics, China might be compelled to concentrate her heavy industry...

...Of course, it can be said that it was not the task of a professor of anthropology and sociology to study Communism...

...and he did so again in 1945...

...Fei's central mistake was undoubtedly his failure to understand the Chinese and global Communist movements...

...The "masters" he revered were the "white" Russian anthropologist Shirokogoroff, the Polish-born English anthropologist Malinowski, and the American sociologist R. E. Park...

...As early as 1939, Fei had stressed the fragmentative effect of the Chinese inheritance law upon landholding...

...The seven essays dealing with China's gentry appeared originally in Chinese newspapers in 1947 and 1948, when the Chinese Communists openly began to challenge the Nationalist Government...

...In his last pre-Communist book, Fei continued to stress the need for a thoroughgoing land reform, but he did not use Communist arguments...

...According to Dr...

...He was a social anthropologist, and, from the beginning, he specialized in problems of agrarian China...

...Thus, he touched upon a crucial aspect of "Oriental" as compared with late feudal and post-feudal landownership...

...and in 1953 it was slightly over 84 per cent...

...There is sharp disagreement as to whether, between 1928 and 1948, a different Kuomintang policy could have built a strong non-Communist "reform" China...

...Describing conditions at Tsinghua University on the eve of the Communist victory, Dr...

...Throughout Asia today, there are thousands of young politicians, educators and journalists earnestly trying to cope with the centuries-old problems of their nations, now come to independence in a complex technological world...

...In a statement published while Attlee and Bevan were in Communist China hailing the success of the Mao regime...

...And, Dr...

...This book shows Fei more critical of the Nationalist Government, but in no way ready to accept the Communist program...

...Redfield, Fei did not see how closely related the Chinese and Russian Communists were...

...And, even more insistently than in 1939, he recommended that a decentralized industry be developed in the Chinese countryside...

...Excellent principles...

...Concern for the Asian peasants was not limited to particular parties or nationalities...

...In many parts of Asia, conditions of land tenure are highly oppressive...

...After an initial terminological coyness, they have finally admitted that the producers' cooperatives are nothing but unmechanized "semi-socialist" collectives...

...It is important to remember this, despite the fact that, during a fateful period of recent history, the designation "agrarian reformer" was used to conceal the identity of the Chinese Communists...

...Fei resumed his academic work at his old university, Tsinghua, near Peking...

...In this connection, it is worth noting that, as late as the close of World War II, both the Russian and the Chinese Communists seem to have expected the Nationalists to rule over the greater part of China for some ten or twenty years to come...

...Asian political leaders understood this long before the Communists appeared on the scene, and sincere agrarian reformers operated—and continue to operate—independently of, and often in opposition to, the Communist movement...

...Fei's utterances aroused strong sympathy and equally strong hostility...

...Taken together with his previous writings, Fei's last pre-Communist book goes far in explaining the thoughts, the dreams and the failures of a genuine Chinese agrarian reformer...

...As a matter of fact, Robert Redfield, author of the introduction to China's Gentry, tells us that Fei "was interested in American democracy and in English socialism...

...And in China's Gentry he even expressed doubts regarding the magnitude of big landed possessions in traditional China: "Compared to areas farmed in the West, even the amounts of land held by so-called "wealthy landlords' tend to be insignificant...

...For the record, it is important to note here that the ideological strategists of the USSR have been conducting a skilful campaign against an interpretation of Asia's great bureaucratic monarchies that emphasizes their semi-managerial character...

...The southwestern environment provided him with new opportunities for rural research, and the strained economy of war-torn China convinced him of the need for a broad, bold reform policy...

...Fei had ample opportunity to learn what Mao's much-advertised "land reform" really meant...

...The Nationalist Government permitted him to go to America to complete his Yunnan studies, which appeared in 1945 under the title Earthbound China...

...Since the first two groups are overtly bureaucracy-rooted and since the third group is covertly so conditioned (Fei considered Government office the main road to landlordism), this analysis implies that the gentry of traditional China was essentially a bureaucratic gentry (the formula is mine) as distinguished from the landed gentry of the feudal and post-feudal West...

...Although members of the new "cooperatives" are still getting some payments based on the amount of land they put into the pool, most of their income now comes from wages...

...they produce more...

...Fei was trained in China, England and the United States...

...Fei translated and reworked them in the fall of 1948, when the Communist victory was all but certain...

...Basing himself on recognized historical facts, he kept insisting that, in the third century bc, China moved from a feudal to a despotic order, which lasted until the beginning of the twentieth century, that is, for more than two millennia...

...Fei did not completely understand the role of China's bureaucracy when he saw it merely as a tool of an all-powerful despot...

...As early as 1939, he stressed the conscientious analysis of empirical facts as the means for "directing the change toward the desired end...

...Fei dictated the new draft to Mrs...

...He took great pride in the thoroughgoing land reform which, under his direction, was carried out in Japan...

...Fei conscientiously applied his principles to some rural communities in Central China and Yunnan...

...They manipulated the land allotments so that the average "new" farm was almost 50 per cent smaller than the average "old" one...

...In China, he observed, Government office rather than agricultural or industrial property and enterprise produced wealth: "Through power to wealth...

...He was shot at during a public meeting...

...But he was certainly correct in saying that the old despotic order was a "tiger," and that, below the ruler, the most important social force was the officialdom and, inextricably tied to it, the "gentry...

...While the Communist masters of the China mainland found their peasants disturbingly apathetic, the For-mosan peasants were improving their farm equipment, crop yields and standard of living...

...He recently published in the International Free Trade Union News a series of articles entitled Mao: Liberator or Destroyer of the Chinese Peasants, soon too be issued in pamphlet form, and is currently working on a much larger comparative study called Oriental Society and Oriental Despotism...

...Enforced state purchases pumped practically all of the peasants' surplus grain into Government storehouses...