LETTER TO SOVIET GOVERNMENT OF HUANG-PO DISTRICT OF JUI-CHIN COUNTY ON THE LAND INVESTIGATION MOVEMENT

13 July 1933

[Text]  Comrades of Huang-po Ch'u:

With the help of the working group of the Central Land Department, you have mobilized the broad masses of workers and peasants in 12 townships of Huang-po District and enthusiastically initiated the movement to investigate land and classes. In the course of this intense class struggle you have found out 270 or more families of landlords and rich peasants. They had hitherto been treated as middle and poor peasants. Some landlords who had been treated as rich peasants were given land and even good farm land. Compared with 122 cases of landlords and rich peasants which had been disposed of by the Soviet government of this district during the past 3 years, this number makes up 70 percent of the total number of cases handled during that period. In the course of this struggle on the investigation of land ownership and classes, you have confiscated a great amount of land and property which were distributed to poor peasants, suppressed the activities of the reactionaries, heightened the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses in the entire soviet sector, purged a number of alien elements and other elements of the worst type who had sneaked into the soviet sector, absorbed a great many activist workers and peasants into our midst, held new elections of district and township soviets, and thus greatly consolidated the soviet political power. This is a great victory in the land ownership investigation movement of Huang-po District. However, the movement has not been brought to its completion. There are still remnants of feudal forces at work and certain reactionary activities going on. This is particularly true in townships of Shang-tuan, Hsin-chuang and Lang-t'ien where some alien and bad elements are covertly or overtly active in deceiving and inciting some of the masses and some of these elements are bent on reversing verdicts on past cases. You must pay utmost attention to such conditions and you must mobilize the masses on the broadest scale in these townships to expose the intrigue of these reactionary elements, continue to investigate the remnant components of landlords and rich peasants, suppress the reactionary elements in Shang-tuan and other townships, prevent them attempt to counterattack and reverse prior verdicts, and tirelessly and unflinchingly lead the masses in their struggle in order to win the final victory in the land investigation movement.

Having carefully examined the investigation forms on which you have determined the composition of class elements, we find that most of your decisions on class elements were correct but a few of them were incorrect. For example, several families should have been determined as landlords but you had decided them to be rich peasants or even middle peasants. Your decision on one family was that it was a usurer but it should have been a rich peasant. In still another case labor power was not filled out clearly; we hope you will reinvestigate and then decide. Now with a view to drawing your careful and clear focus on determining the class elements, we enumerate the errors of your decisions on the class elements of 10 families as follows:

(1) Chou Tsung-jen (a native of Shang-tuan township) This family has three persons. They are not engaged in labor (20 years ago he had been a long-term laborer for 12 years). He owns land of 50 tan which is completely rented out to others. Each year he collects a land rent of 25 tan of rice and has been collecting it for 7 years. He also has a strip of hilly land which yields him a few hundred mao a year. He is a lender of mortgaged land rent of a tan from which he deducts 400 yuan. (You decided him to be a middle peasant)

(2) Hsieh Ming-tsu (a native of Shang-tuan) with himself as the sole member of the family. He does not engage in labor. He owns land of 39 tan which is completely rented out and on which he collects land rent of 16 tan of rice a year; he has been collecting it for 20 years. He owns a house which is rented for 1 tan of rice a year and he has been collecting it for 20 or more years. He lends money totalling 1,040 mao. In the past he had oppressed people in the rural area and forced the masses to attack the Red Army. (You decided him to be a rich peasant)

(3) Chu Te-meng (a native of Hsin-chuang township) The family has two persons. They are not engaged in labor. He owns a land of 41 tan which is completely rented out to others. He is a lender of mortgaged land rent of 1 tan. He has also been a lender of 30 yuan for 8 or 9 years. (You decided him to be a rich peasant)

(4) Chung T'ung-chi (a native of Shan-ho township) The family has two persons. They are not engaged in labor. He owns a land of 85 1/2 tan. He regularly hires long-term as well as odd laborers to till 46! tan and rents out 39 tan of his land. He is a lender of 1 tan of new rice. He manages two pieces of communal land. (You decided him to be a rich peasant).

(5) Liu Fang-lo (a native of Fu-ch'i township) The family has three persons. They do not engage in labor. He owns a land of 51 tan and rents from other another 14 tan on which he pays a land rent of 2 tan, 90 catties. Each year he collects land rent of 14 tan on his land of 35 tan which he rents out to others. He has been collecting it for 8 years. He hires long-term and short-term laborers to till his tan of his land. He owes a debt of 1,590 mao. He has been managing a piece of communal land for 8 years. In the past he was influential in the rural area and had oppressed people. (You decided him to be a rich peasant)

Based on the conditions filled out on the investigation forms and viewed from their land relations and relations of exploitation, the above five families are not middle or rich peasants but are all landlords (small landlords). In the families of Chou Tsung-jen, Hsieh Ming-tsu and Chu Te-ming, no one is engaged in labor. They rent out all of their land and are wholly dependent on rents for their living. These are typical specimen of landlords. Thus your decision of Chou Tsung-jen as a middle peasant and your decision of Hsieh Ming-tsu and Chu Te-meng as rich peasants are all wrong. As for Chung T'ung-chi and Liu Fang-lo, no member of these families is engaged in labor. They all are totally dependent on exploitation. The difference between them and the other three families is that they rented out a portion of their land and hired long-term laborers to till the other portion of their land at home. But they are just the same landlords and not rich peasants. This is because the price of labor power in the rural areas of China is extremely cheap and many of the landlord class have utilized a part of their land and their old farm implements by hiring laborers to till them at their home. They have most cruelly exploited these laborers in various forms of feudal servitude while at the same time they rent out another part of their land to peasants to be exploited by them. Here these landlords differ from rich peasants in that they are not engaged in labor themselves whereas rich peasants are so engaged in person. Because you have overlooked this point, you have erred in your decision.

(6) Hsiao Hau-chiao (a native of Yuan-k'eng township) This family has four persons. He himself engaged in labor to a small extent (he was killed during the revolution). He owned a land of 62 tan of which 38 tan were tilled by his long-term laborers (he had hired long-term laborers for two generations up to the time of the revolution). He rented out 24 tan of his land (for 36 years). He owns three strips of catalpa tree hilly land yielding 42 tan of catalpa wood a year. He lent money amounting to 210 mao. He managed two pieces of communal land which earned him a land rent of 20 tan of rice a year. He had been collecting it for 3 years. He had oppressed people in the past. (You decided him to be a rich peasant)

(7) Liu Chi-ho (a native of Hu-ling township) This family has three persons. He engages in labor himself to a small extent. He owns a land of 63 tan of which he hires long-term laborers to till 32 tan and rents out the remainder of 33 tan on which he collects land rent of 15 tan of rice. He owns three strips of hilly land which yields him over 30 yuan a year. He has a pond which yields him 40 or more yuan a year. He rents out six houses collecting rent in kind of 6 tan of rice a year. He rents out a privy collecting rent in kind of 30 catties of rice a year. He manages four pieces of communal land on which he collects rent in kind of 99 tan 29 catties of rice a year. He was quite influential in the rural area. (You decided him to be a rich peasant)

Both of the above two families rent out a part of their land but at the same time hire long-term and short-term laborers to till another part of their land. They live almost entirely by exploitation. These facts are identical with

those of the families of Chung T'ung-chi and Liu Fang-lo. The difference lies in that they themselves engage in labor to a small extent but only to a small extent. Thus they should still be determined as landlords but you were wrong in deciding them to be rich peasants. This is because rich peasants are actually engaged in production on their land. Those who engage in light labor to a small extent cannot be said to be rich peasants. The number of such small landlords who engage in labor to a very small extent but live mostly by exploitation is not inconsiderable in China.

(8) Ch'en Tse-hung (a native Yuan-k'eng township) The family has five persons. Only one person is engaged in labor. He owns land of 62 tan and rents from others another of 10 tan on which he pays a land rent for 1 tan of rice. The land is tilled by himself and by a long-term laborer. He owns two strips of catalpa tree hilly land which yields him 40 tan of catalpa wood a year. Each year he hires a long-term laborer as he has done for the last 10 years. He has been a lender of mortgaged land rent of 1 1/2 tan of rice for 5 years. He has been a money lender totalling 500 mao for 20 or more years. He rents out a room for 4 mao a year for the 34 years. In the past he had oppressed people in the rural area. (You decided him to be a middle peasant)

Ch'en Tse-hung regularly hires long-term laborers. At the same time he is also a usurer and administrator of communal land. He relies on exploitation as the main source of his livelihood, but he is actually engaged in production on his land. This is a typical specimen of a rich peasant in China. You were wrong in deciding him to be a middle peasant.

(9) Chung Kuo-fang (a native of Pai-ti township) This family has nine persons, three of whom are engaged in labor. He owns a land of 112 tan and three strips of catalpa tree and bamboo hilly land. He has been lending money totalling 3,200 mao for over 10 years. He rents out two rooms for 2 yuan a year. As rent has not been paid, it has accumulated with compound interest to a total of 7,000 or more mao. (You decided him to be a usurer)

A usurer is one who depends for his livelihood exclusively or mainly on exploitation by lending money at high interest. The soviet policy on usurers is total confiscation and class elimination. Chung Kuo-fang owns a land of 120 tan which is completely tilled by himself and makes up the main source of income for his livelihood. We must not determine him to be a usurer and adopt the policy of eliminating him because he also lends money at high interest. It is incorrect to take this kind of excessively left point of view by ignoring his own labor. The correct decision should be to make him a rich peasant, confiscate his land, his surplus draft animals, farm implements and houses, but he should still be given some relatively poor land to be tilled by his own labor. Why can't he be called a well-to-do middle peasant? Because his exploitation by usury has reached the figure of 10,000 mao and it has been a regular exploitation. Some rich peasants engage in this kind of exploitation to some extent but this is not regularly done and the amount is certainly not large.

(10) Liu Ch'i-ch'ang (a native of Pai-ti township) This family has four persons. He himself engages in farming to some extent and is also a pig broker. He owns land of 36 tan and rents from other another 44 tan on which he pays 1 tan of rice as land rent. He has two strips of hilly land which yield him 20 tan of catalpa wood and peanuts a year. He has been hiring long-term laborers for 18 years. He is a lender of mortgaged land rent of 2 tan and 1 lo of new rice. He manages a communal land which yields him 15 tan of rice a year. (You decided him to be a landlord)

We have some doubt whether this man should be a landlord. According to the investigation form, his family has tilled their rice field of 80 tan and two strips of hilly land. If he hires only one long-term laborer to till them, it would not be enough so the amount of his own labor is probably quite substantial. If the amount of his own labor is relatively substantial, then he should be determined as a rich peasant. You should not adopt the policy of eliminating him but should treat him according to the elements of a rich peasant. Moreover, some landlords rent land to be tilled by long-term laborers, but this is in the minority and the majority of landlords do not rent land from others. Now this man has occupied the greater part of the land from others; such is frequently the case with rich peasants. It is, therefore, necessary for you to find out the condition of his own labor before reaching a correct decision whether he should be a landlord or a rich peasant. If you have clearly established that the amount of his own labor is incidental and quite small, then your decision is a correct one.

The People's Committee of the Central Land Department

"Red China," No 95 23 July 1933
13 July 1933

11,667