ABSTRACT
Whether curse or prophecy, “The First Emperor will die and his land be divided” suggested the end of the Qin dynasty (221-206 bc). Only with the downfall of the despotic Qin could the other six states end their ignoble existence under the iron tyrant. In its original context the Chinese term difen 地分, “his land be divided,” did not connote a redistribution of the land to its tillers, but rather the shattered land of the state and the breakdown of a ruthless dynasty. History proved the prophecy at least half right: the First Emperor died one year later in 210 bc, not long after his Qin dynasty had claimed sovereignty over China. But the land that was then divided into Wei 魏, Shu 蜀, and Wu 吴 was soon reunited and expanded as the even greater state of Han 汉 under the leadership of Liu Bang 刘邦 (256-195 bc). Though harassed by surrounding tribes from time to time, the region continued to survive, consolidated, even until today, under the glorious appellation of China in 202 bc. Like anything else taken out of context, “his land be divided” found a new fate nearly two millennia later when Mao Dun 茅盾 appropriated the epithet and put it into the mouths of peasant rebels in his rewriting of the first recorded mass-scale peasant insurgency in Chinese history, led by Chen Sheng 陈胜 and Wu Guang 吴广.2 In Mao Dun’s retelling, “The First Emperor will die and his land be divided” expressed the peasants’ primitive desire for land, a desire repressed and denied within the feudal system. Like most writers on historical subjects, Mao Dun tried to make the ancient speak on behalf of its contemporary counterpart. In the 1930s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had to move to
the countryside after a series of frustrations in the city. The CCP was struggling for survival, establishing revolutionary bases and winning peasants over to the revolutionary cause by promising them land and other equal opportunities in the new society. As a consciously conformist writer, Mao Dun showed his identification with the CCP through his ostensibly progressive writing by drawing attention away from petty-bourgeoisie intellectual abstractions and focusing on the down-to-earth realities of the peasantry.3 “Down to earth” should be understood literally here. There are several English equivalents for di 地 or tudi 土地 in Chinese: land, earth, soil, ground, and so on. In this chapter, different English referents of 地 and 土地 are used for contextual convenience. China has traditionally been an agrarian country for thousands of years. As the pioneering Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong 费孝通 discovered in the 1940s, its society is fundamentally rural. He described China as a nation based on the soil with a personal anecdote: The first time he went abroad, his nanny wrapped some dirt scraped from a stove in red paper and put it in his suitcase as a blessing.4 “Go tilling with sunrise; back home with sunset” (ri chu er zuo, ri luo er xi) has been a typical description of conventional Chinese life. Not much theorization is needed to explain how much land means to a nation that bases its livelihood on the earth. The land matters on multiple levels. First, land is the basic productive resource of the peasant masses. Second, soil is where people’s roots are fixed. Third, earth is more tangible than its counterpart, heaven. On earth people find a foothold, build a house, and grow their food; in other words, they spend their lives materially in this world. These three imports are interrelated. On the basis of the above three levels, moving from the concrete to the abstract, I propose to understand the literary depiction of land as a gateway to the configuration of space in the specific context of modern China. I define space here as the threedimensional domain perceived by human senses through the interplay of physical experience and imagination. Consequently, land reform in the 1920s is the beginning of the spatial reconfiguration of modern China. Land reform has many precedents in China and plenty of counterparts abroad since modernization. Many of the uprisings throughout China’s long history were intended to reform land ownership in favor of peasants.5 The most spectacular and influential one might be the Land System of the Heavenly Kingdom (Tianchao tianmu zhidu 天朝田亩制度), put in place in 1853 during the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) (Taiping tianguo 太平天国).6 Peasant movements were a dynamic force in regime changes throughout the dynastic period and are an essential part of premodern Chinese history, especially within the Communist historical-materialist outlook. Such movements can appear to be cyclical, uncanny returns of the repressed over two millennia, continuing until the foundation of the People’s Republic of China. From our perspective today we might be amazed by the history of revolt by landless peasants like Chen Sheng and Wu Guang and the thousands who followed in their footsteps for centuries. Perhaps we should also be astonished by the fact that Chinese peasants in the twenty-first century are still far from owning the land they work, even though the slogan
“The people are sovereign over their land” (Renmin dangjia zuozhu 人民当家做 主) has hung over China for more than half a century. The Chinese narrative of social(ist) revolution is universally well known: After a series of failed experiments in urban uprisings,7 the revolution moved to the countryside and recouped its strength.8 This move offered Mao the first opportunity to take the lion’s share of the credit for the successful Chinese revolution, since he realized the feasibility, importance, and necessity of peasant revolution in his Report of the Investigation of the Hunan Peasant Movement (1927), even though he denounces his arch political rival Chen Duxiu, the former central leader of the CCP, as “the Right opportunist.”9 Because distributing land in promise and in practice was the fundamental concern of peasant revolutionsometimes called agrarian revolution-I use “land reform” rather than one of those two terms to emphasize the significance of land in this movement. Mao must have been impressed by the victories of the rebellious peasantry, and may well have been inspired by those who succeeded in overturning the previous dynasties and establishing their own.10 Revolution in China may have meant, for Mao and many others, the struggle for land. However, his ambition, and that of the peasants, encompassed much more: to him, it was the means; to the masses, it was the end. Ends justify means, but means do not ensure ends. Land reform provides a field in which the oppressed masses of the old society take center stage to vent their rage in a compelling action that makes obtaining their goal palpably close. The peasants’ will to secure land, which had been ruthlessly repressed for thousands of years, was transformed into the will to revolution under the new circumstances conditioned by Communist mobilization. My objective is to trace the genealogical origin of revolution transforming space to the land reform in the 1920s Chinese Communist agenda. I argue that land, as a concrete materialistic form as well as the base of space, was the first object to be revolutionized. In this chapter I focus on literary manifestations of land reform as an intermediary between land and revolution. The relationships among land, writing, and revolution are complex. Land, both cause and effect of the revolution, is presented as an object of the peasantry’s collective primitive desire in these writings, as well as an effective means to engage the peasants in the revolution. With the will to revolution looming large, the will to gain land gave place to a grander project: class struggle and national salvation. Writing played a dubious role in this revolutionary practice. Intended to promote the idea of transferring land to the tillers, it expresses in an accessible style the peasants’ quest for land. The solution suggested is, however, wishful thinking. More subversively, these writings unintentionally reveal the limits and even the impossibility of land reform. I understand land reform as an attempt to redefine human beings’ relationship to land, by means of possessing it or losing it. With the change in the relationship of humans to land, i.e., the redistribution of land among people, social relations change too. The identification of a person with a particular piece of land embodies the individual’s position in physical space; it also determines a person’s material distance from others, and so constitutes the basis of human social relations.
