While treaty ports along China's coast were feeling the direct impact
of foreign demands during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
most people in China were — and still are — rural people,
living in towns and villages. Although most farmers in China owned some
land and often had sources of income apart from farm work, such as handicrafts,
life was generally harsh. Farm plots were very small, averaging less
than two acres per family, and peasants had little access to new technology,
capital, or cheap transport. We have read about the nineteenth
century internal crises which had terrible repercussions for country
folk — wars and rebellions, droughts and floods. From late Qing
times on, new taxes and charges were levied against individual village
residents and/or the village as a unit to pay for government administration,
state services like police and education, and most importantly, military
expenses. More insidious were the less visible effects of the new international
economy into which China had inexorably been drawn. Tea, silk, sugar,
and tobacco were all products with increasing competition in this period,
and thus international market forces began to affect rural people in
China's interior.
There is much debate about whether China's farmers were "immiserated" in
this period, that is, if they faced worse conditions than in previous
times. But, as the first reading on raising silkworms demonstrates, without
greater technological inputs, just working harder was not always enough
to stave off privation. Addressing the problems of the farmers was a
major challenge for Chinese leaders. The short story, by Mao Dun (Shen
Yanbing, 1896-1981), entitled "Spring
Silkworms," also demonstrates a greater awareness, on
the part of a new breed of politically engaged and socially conscious
urban writers in the 1920s and 1930s, of the plight of people in the
countryside.
Traditional Marxist thinking relegated peasants to a class which Marx
believed represented "barbarism within civilization" — people
who were unable to develop revolutionary consciousness and only wanted
land and bread (food). During the Russian Revolution, Lenin revised Marx's
view, assigning peasants a more supporting revolutionary role, although
he still believed that it was the urban working class which initiated
revolution. In the 1920s, Chinese leftists began to change their view
of the revolutionary potential of the rural population. Some, like the
Guomindang organizer in South China, Peng Pai, had great success from
1921-23 in convincing disaffected farmers to form peasant associations
and challenge oppressive landlords. Likewise, Mao Zedong's own work in
the rural areas in 1925 and 1926 led him to see the farmers differently.
When Nationalists forces after 1927 drove him and other Communists to
rural hideouts from their urban bases, they intensified their work among
the rural population. Their belief in rural revolution thus became a
hallmark of Chinese Communist thinking. |