Country Driving [94]
By then the Communists had already risen to power in northern China. They made their base in Shaanxi Province, in the rugged hills of the loess plateau, and their core support consisted of poor peasants. One of Mao Zedong’s main goals was to grant land ownership to the people who actually farmed, ending the system of landlord domination. As the Communists gained control of the country, they instituted this reform with remarkable speed. It helped that they had no scruples about violence: during the 1940s and 1950s, thousands of landlords were killed in cold blood. Fields were given to tenant farmers, and an additional fifty million families, mostly poor, suddenly received title. Most had never held any sort of legal ownership; many couldn’t even sign their names.
In the Wei family contracts, this landmark historical change appears in a document from September of 1949, one month before the official founding of the People’s Republic. The contract is beautifully illustrated: the borders are decorated with fat red ears of corn, and the bottom features pictures of farmers planting and harvesting under a healthy sun. At the top is an unsmiling portrait of Mao Zedong. The text explains that five members of the Wei family have the right to seven plots of land. The plots are listed, and in terms of acreage they are minuscule: 0.20 acres, 0.12 acres, 0.05 acres, 0.05 acres, 0.02 acres, 0.02 acres, and 0.025 acres. In total it’s less than half an acre for an extended family, but it’s more than the Weis ever possessed in the past. One plot formerly belonged to the Shitkicker’s father—apparently he hadn’t been able to redeem the pawned land—but there’s no mention of who formerly owned the other fields. Wei Ziqi told me that they once belonged to members of the Yan family, the big local landlords, although he didn’t know what became of them. “They were struggled against,” he said, vaguely, and left it at that. His father never told him many stories about the past.
Across rural China, this initial stage of Communist land reform had an immediate effect. The new sense of ownership made farmers more likely to work hard, and in the early 1950s the nation’s rural productivity increased, along with living standards. But these improvements turned out to be short-lived, because Mao became obsessed with deepening the revolution. During the second half of the 1950s, he commanded that rural land be reorganized once more, this time into village communes. Farmers lost their new titles, as well as their right to individual profit. Everything was to be shared in common—the fields, the labor, the harvest—and the outcome was disastrous. During the Great Leap Forward, from 1958 to 1961, Mao instructed farmers to contribute to industrial development; communes were expected to meet steel production quotas. They ended up melting down farm implements and cooking tools, and in many places the people stopped raising crops. A famine swept across rural China, and tens of millions starved to death.
Wei Ziqi’s father never told any stories about this period, either. Like most people in the countryside, he refused to linger on unhappy memories, and the family collection of contracts essentially ends at the commune period. There’s nothing to mark the beginning of collectivization, and there’s no document from 1961, when the Great Leap Forward was finally abandoned. After that, the Chinese commune system remained in place, and if the Weis were given contracts, they didn’t keep them. Only one document survives: an undated labor card that most likely was used in the late 1960s. The card notes how