Dear Teacher,
After six months the university promulgated (made known) the list of the Communist Party members and a new democratic Youth League of China was set up. Later it would become the Communist Youth League.
I joined the Youth League and we often held meetings until midnight, which interfered greatly with my studies. When we were not meeting I was so busy studying. It was my natural disposition now to work very hard. I had strong discipline as a student. I was not a good League member from the start to the finish. Gradually I found the party occupied too commanding of a position in my life, conflicting so much with my studies.
I felt that the League looked down on the masses and our important goals to improve our lives through education. The League was supposed to mean everything to us and be more important than anything else in our lives. That to me seemed foolish and not truly productive for ourselves or the country.
In 1950 the Communist League Organization decided to move our university, Tongji, which had been in Shanghai for almost seventy years to Dalian. This was very far away in a province, Liaoning, much farther north. Dalian had a large harbor and had brought Russia and Japan to the brink of war in 1904.
Many students were against the League Organization. A meeting was held to inquire the way to deal with this situation. I deeply felt there was great antagonism between the party and the masses. That time upper level students organized a mass meeting to argue the move of the school. Masses signed a petition against moving our university to Dalian. As a result, trying to move the school did not acquire success. Afterwards these upper level schoolmates graduated and got jobs, but in 1955 in the movement for the elimination of counterrevolutionaries they were pronounced guilty and put in prison, many for eight years.
There were three political movements being launched from 1950 to 1952. In 1950 the movement to suppress counter-revolution was fierce, but lasted for a short time. Only a few students were arrested.
From 1951 to 1952 there was a movement against The Three Evils of corruption, waste and bureaucracy within the Party, government, army and mass organization.
There also was a movement Against Five Evils of bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on government contracts and stealing of economic information. In the early stage it was directed at activities as practiced by owners of private industrial and commercial enterprises. In the later stage this was directed against business circles, and in the end, in order to magnify the problem, the evils were applied to the masses. Therefore, at that time many many men took their own lives rather than face the severe harassment, persecution and who knew what other consequences. Saving face was still a strong concept in Chinese society. There were two acquaintances in my university who died in such a way. In the end, many matters were left unsettled. But, it was too late for those who had already settled matters themselves.
Before I graduated in the summer of 1952, the Communist party launched a movement called Ideological Remolding. This movement was aimed at students and the goal was that schoolmates must confess their political ideals and other ideals. If they were not confessed in a satisfactory way, the student would not graduate. Therefore in 1952, my last term at the university, we almost couldn’t study the subjects of our degree. We held meetings all day until midnight working on writing out our ideals so the Communist Party would allow us to graduate. But, at last, all the students were passed and I received my degree.
Sincerely, Robert
JOAN’S BRIEF HISTORY OF CHINA—PART V
I needed to learn more about the early days of the Chinese Communist Party.
In its early years the Communist government was remarkably successful in establishing its power and restoring a measure of well being and prosperity to the people of China. Land reform brought some equality to the countryside. The Marriage Law offered some rights to women, although it did weaken the position of the individual. Of course, the ending of Civil War brought an immediate improvement in the economy and a new national sense of pride and accomplishment. Also, there was the psychological improvement that comes from relieving the constant fears of danger and death from both war and internal fighting.
“Throughout the country, mass propaganda and personal persuasion were used to ensure acceptance of the new regime. Among the people, even those who had never shown any concern with politics were required to join demonstrations, giving them for the first time a sense of participation, and binding them also to the cause they had now publicly endorsed. In kindergartens and schools, even in the poorest communities, children were taught slogans and songs supporting the government and the party. They were urged to tell their parents and elders of the new morality and to criticize or report those who failed to live up to it. In all circumstances, the Communists taught the people, each individual should consider the good of the whole, and no single person was entitled to excess advantage or privilege. Most importantly the new Communist administrators were honest and courteous in their behavior toward the people.”
Of course, not everything was wonderful for everyone. In many regions of China, the redistribution of land gave opportunity for mass meetings, which often instituted violence against wealthy men and their families. Many landlords and rich peasants purged their wrongs before an assembly of locals and were then permitted to have a place in the new society. But, emotions ran high and atrocities were reported where men were shot or hanged by a vindictive mob. The death toll is not known, but “no doubt that several hundred thousand people were accused, condemned and murdered in legalized lynch courts.” (p192)
Under the new Communist regime, slogans and campaigns attacked private individual relationships and people were urged to direct all their energies to national service under the leadership of the party. The Marriage Law of 1950 although giving needed rights to women also provided opportunity for direct involvement of the Communist Party in the daily private lives of the people.
Women, on occasion, were driven to or inspired to criticize their husbands in public political meetings and children were taught in school to denounce their parents for errors and faults. Often elderly women, enjoying their new power and position, were the most energetic agents for local Communist control.
At the end of 1953 it was announced that the traditional peasant life with each family being responsible for the produce of its own fields, would be changed to a system of rural co-operatives and communes, with all land held by the community and all labor given to common service. Immediately, there were disagreements over the division of labor between energetic and competent farmers and those that were lazy and inefficient. There were many problems and great resistance in some places to this new system, which had greater advantages for the Communist government than for the people involved. On strictly economic grounds, the pooling of resources gave more opportunity for the purchase of modern machinery, which was too expensive for any individual. A second advantage for the Party was control and prevention of private wealth and personal profit. There was also direct control of every aspect of farming and their personal lives in communes where there was no family privacy. There were quotas of production and the collection of revenue for the government was easier than it had ever been before.
Besides the drastic changes in agriculture the other area of development was industrial production to provide a domestic supply of machinery and chemicals. Considered a major achievement was the reconstruction of the Anshan Iron and Steel Works in Manchuria south of Shenyang.
Overall, during the First Five-Year Plan from 1953 to 1957, the economy of China probably achieved a growth rate of six percent. This new prosperity was shared throughout the whole society, but it was also obtained at the cost of considerable cruelty to those regarded as “enemies of the people.”