Steven W. Mosher - Broken Earth. The Rural Chinese

Copyright 1983 by The Free Press A Division of Macmillan, Inc.

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First Free Press Paperback Edition 1984

Printed in the United States of America

Paperback printing number

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Hardcover printing number

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Mosher, Steven W.

Broken earth.

Includes index.

1. ChinaRural conditions. I. Title.

HN733.5.M67 1983 306.0951 83-47982

ISBN 0-02-921700-8

eISBN-13: 978-1-439-11967-9

ISBN-13: 978-0-029-21720-7

ISBN 0-02-921720-2 pbk.

For Huiya

As part of the extension of ties between the United States and the Peoples Republic of China heralded by the establishment of diplomatic relations on January 1, 1979, a cultural exchange program was initiated. It was as a research scholar under this program that I lived in a Chinese village during the last half of that year and the first half of the next. My goal was a community study of a production brigade, what in the years before collectivization would have been called a village, focusing on the usual array of anthropological exoticakinship patterns, marriage customs, religious ceremonies, social structure, and the like. But upon returning to Taiwan (and another research project) at the end of my fieldwork and beginning to sift through and reorganize the copious notes I kept while in China, amounting to well over 100 notebooks in all, I discovered that they contained another story as well. Putting aside the esoteric and the academic, postponing the process of statistical analysis and sociological generalization, I found that there remained a tale of what it is like to live in todays China, told by the rural Chinese themselves.

In retelling their anecdotes and observations, I have sought to bring the rural Chinese within reach, to describe what it is like to live with them in their villages and celebrate the lunar New Year with jian dui pastries and lion dances, to mourn with them at funerals and rejoice with them at marriages and the birth of sons, to sit with them at collective meetings and listen to them discuss crops and policy, to take tea with them in their teahouses at dawn and to enjoy a game of basketball with them at dusk, coming over time to appreciate the bitterness of their past, the frustrations of their present, and their hopes for the future.

While this is a report of people encountered, events experienced, and anecdotes related to me during my year in China, it is also an attempt to compose from this collection of ethnographic miniatures a portrait of the rural Chinese. I do not pretend that my rendering encompasses all that it means to be a peasant in the Peoples Republic. Nearly all of my time in China was spent in the southern province of Guangdong (Kwangtung), and my configuration of what it is like to live in village China is grounded largely in the experiences of southern Chinese. But in understanding a people as different from ourselvesalong whatever social, economic, cultural, or political dimension one cares to measureas the Chinese, depth is often more important than breadth. All too often descriptions of the fabric of Chinese life have been cut from the whole cloth of stilted Marxist rhetoric as preserved in issues of the Beijing Review (Peking Review) or stitched together from the odd tatters of impression and sentiment collected during month-long tourist junkets. What I have attempted here is a more intimate, full-bodied description.

Though I was able to carry out my fieldwork without hindrance or even surveillance by the authorities, the Peoples Republic is nevertheless a police state, and those who were critical to me of the current order would face reprisals, up to and including lengthy imprisonment, if their identities should become known. This is especially so now that Beijing, furious over my unmasking of rural problems, has denounced me as a foreign spy and has demanded that I be punished. I have thus been led to take every possible precaution that this account does not cause unpleasant repercussions for those who have given me their confidence. While informants, usually higher-ranking cadres, who adhered closely to the official line have been correctly identified, those persons who ventured less orthodox opinionsand these are in the majorityhave been carefully disguised by giving them fictional identities, that is, by altering their names and other unimportant aspects of their lives. These changes in no way affect the substance of their conversations with me, but should protect them from official retribution for their honesty. Considerations of confidentiality also dictated against writing the story of the village that I lived inthough I hope to do so in the futureand I have here drawn fairly heavily on visits I made to other communities in other communes during the course of my study, all of which are referred to by invented English names. The descriptions of these visits are otherwise accurate, just as the quotations, though not always attributable, are genuine. I recorded interviews as they were in progress and made notes on less staged encounters immediately after they occurred.

I have chosen to romanize Chinese words after the Pinyin system currently in use in the Peoples Republic and adopted by the Western press, rather than after the Wade-Giles system favored by scholars, though I have retained older conventional spellings of names of people and places when these are so well known that to do otherwise would risk confusion. Thus I have left Jiang Jieshi as Chiang Kai-shek, and Guomindang (Nationalist Party) as Kuomintang. For less well-known places and people I adhere strictly to Pinyin, though to assist the reader in making the necessary mental connection, the first appearance of a new Pinyin spelling is followed with its more familiar spelling in parenthesis. Chinese names are written in their proper order, with last names first and first names last.

A number of people have helped with the manuscript in various stages of preparation. Joyce Seltzer was everything an editor should be in giving constant encouragement and trenchant suggestions. Cynthia Parker and Cindy Nil typed many chapters of the manuscript as an act of friendship. My wife, Huiya, to whom this book is dedicated, was my most critical reader as she translated it into Chinese. Karen Strauss of The Free Press dealt expertly with the media when the storm of controversy over my research findings broke.

My primary debt, all the more deeply felt because it is impossible to repay, is to those Chinese, most of whom must remain anonymous, who led me to an understanding of their native land. Not least among those who can be mentioned is Joceline Lau, a Hong Kong Chinese who interrupted her education to serve as my research assistant largely out of a personal desire to come to a better understanding of conditions in her homeland. Her enthusiasm for the New China often spilled over into our daily discussions of the days interviewing. Much has changed for the better in the past thirty years, she stressed on more than one occasion. You shouldnt be oversensitive to the venality of a few bad officials, the excesses of current campaigns to control births and modernize, or the superstitions of a handful of old women. Valuing her admonitions as a corrective to any possible ethnocentrism on my part, I tried to focus on the positive, especially near the end of my stay when the burden of confessions, confidences, and complaints that officials, workers, and peasants alike had disclosed to me had grown achingly heavy, but in the end I could only report what I had seen and heard. I alone bear responsibility for the account of life in contemporary rural China that follows.