Christopher L. Bennett
Modern China
Self-and-Mutual Criticism in the Fanshen Movement
AWithin the long, long tradition of centralized rule,@ historian Jonathan Spence has said, Athe ideas of thought reform and rectification and confession and contrition form a surprisingly large part of the intellectual approach to rulership.@[1] It has always been important to Chinese leaders that their followers not only act in the desired way, but think in the desired way as well. This tradition was manifested in the Chinese Communist revolution by the policy of self-and-mutual criticism, by which the members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) were expected to ensure their own propriety by confessing their own mistakes to others and allowing others to point out their failings. Though in a sense this was a continuation of the ancient tradition cited above, it was here reshaped in response to the ideals of the CPC. In theory, the movement sought to end autocracy and place all power in the hands of the masses. In time, leaders would supposedly become unnecessary; but until then, the leaders of the movement were held answerable to the masses, to ensure they did not abuse their authority and followed the will of the people. It was that will, not the emperor=s ideology, that theoretically provided the baseline for the Communist version of thought reform, and it was to the people that wrongdoers were expected to confess and show contrition.
Self-criticism was intended as a check on the behavior of the Party=s members, a check which relied not on the threat of punishment but on education and the rectification of incorrect thought and action. As Mao Zedong expressed it in 1942:
In exposing errors and criticizing defects, our whole purpose is the same as the doctor=s in treating a case: namely, to cure the patient but not to kill him.... Any person who has committed errors is welcome to treatment until he is cured and becomes a good comrade, so long as he does not conceal his malady for fear of taking medicine or persist in his errors until he becomes incorrigible but honestly and sincerely wishes to be cured and made better.[2]
Surely the willingness to question oneself and be questioned is an exceptional thing in the history of political power. Was this movement actually effective? Did it actually help the members of the CPC to improve themselves and serve the people, and to build trust between the leaders and the led? To examine this question, we shall study William Hinton=s Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, perhaps the most detailed available English-language examination of the day-by-day operation of the revolutionary process.
Fanshen describes the events of the period from 1945-48 in the small North China village of Changzhuang, which Hinton translates as Long Bow. Hinton visited Long Bow from March to July of 1948 as an observer with a CPC Awork team@ sent to monitor and correct the behavior of local Party members and agents, called cadres. After an almost novelistic reconstruction of events prior to his arrival, Hinton depicts the entire process of this mission of reform and education in careful detail. Though clearly impressed by what he observes, Hinton does his best to be an impartial observer and acknowledge the effort=s flaws as well as its successes.
AThe method adopted in this campaign,@ Hinton writes, Awas to set up a gate or council of delegates, elected by the peasants at large, before which all the cadres had to answer for their motives and their actions.@ The first attempt at this was launched in the spring of 1947, in response to evidence of abusive and oppressive behavior on the part of local cadres. The first attempt to evoke criticism from the public failed, according to Hinton, because a disruptive minority used it as a forum for personal vendettas, undermining the efforts at reform. The party leaders backpedalled Aand in effect suppressed criticism, both honest and dishonest.@[3]
The work team later accompanied by Hinton had the broader purpose of ensuring that the overall fanshen movement, the land reform process in which property and power were redistributed from the landowning class to the citizenry at large, was successful and correctly done. The rectification of cadre behavior through the gate was seen as integral to this, since it was believed that the local cadres had mishandled the process and appropriated excessive wealth for themselves. ALong Bow was treated as a village where the whole slate had to be wiped clean and the peasant movement had to be reorganized from the ground up.@[4]
This time the work team engaged in extensive preparation for the gate, conducting numerous meetings with the townspeople to clarify key questions about the nature and policies of the CPC and how to deal with its wrongdoers. By doing this, and by revealing the identities of Party members (previously kept secret due to the ongoing civil war) and giving them recognizable faces, the work team helped create a reasonable attitude toward the reform process.[5]
The gate appeared to go well. All the Party members were brought before the people, confessed their wrongdoings and accepted criticism from others. Once the crimes had been confessed, the people discussed what the cadres must do to make amends. If a satisfactory conclusion was reached, the cadre passed the gate and was redeemed. In the initial gate, only four persons failed to pass, most notably Wang Man-hsi, a brutish, bullying cadre who failed to accept responsibility for his misdeeds, tending to shift the blame onto others: AI beat him twice because they said he was a rascal;@ AIt was Fan Ming-hsi... who spoke out their names.... I did what he asked.@[6] Wang also denied some of the charges levelled against him, convincing the delegates that he was still lying.
But in the aftermath, it became evident that there had been mistakes in the work team=s approach. Their assumption that the Party cadres were corrupt and that the fanshen movement had failed turned out to be unwarranted. Basically honest cadres had been subjected to unjust persecution. AConcentration on the weaknesses, errors, and crimes of the Party members had completely obscured any merits they might have had.... [A]n atmosphere was created in which only those who bowed their heads won approval.@[7] All this was brought out when the work team was subjected to a gate of its own -- this time answering to their Party superiors rather than the masses.
Subsequently, the whole process of evaluation and criticism was repeated more than once, to correct previous excesses and shortfalls. It became evident that this would be a lengthy learning process, as the people gradually learned radical new ways of doing things. In the second gate, the basically honest cadres were given no trouble, but emphasis was placed on punishing the confirmed oppressors. Again the work team found themselves criticized by their superiors, this time because they Ahad attempted to crush the people=s new oppressors, not remake them. In working thus they had distorted the essence of the >Purification Movement,= and had followed in the wake of those impetuous poor peasants who demanded only revenge for past injuries and who had no vision of the potential of leaders who had temporarily gone astray.@[8] Mao=s injunction to Acure the patient but not to kill him@ had been ignored.
When the faults of the operation were made clear, some of the cadres insisted that their superiors deserved some of the blame, for the Party secretaries had approved the policies pursued by the work teams. There was some dispute between the upper and lower cadres over this, but ultimately the county leaders surprised the lower cadres by accepting primary responsibility for the mistakes. Hinton says this made it easier for the lower cadres to acknowledge their own errors. AFace to face with widespread mistakes, all the participants were forced to leave the safe haven of implicit faith, of automatic instructions coming from above. They were forced to think for themselves, to broaden their knowledge, to investigate and study carefully, and to assume individual responsibility for their acts.@[9]
Hinton depicts a learning process in which mistakes were made but then learned from and corrected, demonstrating that the underlying principles were basically sound. AThe method, I began to realize, was something that had to be learned.... I began to think that the distortions... were not something inherent in the method but a consequence of its unskilled application.@[10] He illustrates the beneficial results it produced: APassing the gate for the second time made the Communists realize that in spite of all gripes and grumbles, the people really did support them. It gave them new heart.@[11] Even Wang Man-hsi, the unrepentant bully, eventually benefitted from the attempt to redeem wrongdoers through education and behavior modification. He was restored to his position and accepted, against his nature, the Party=s insistence on nonviolent tactics.[12]
However, in the longer analysis, the gate proved to have numerous negative consequences. The Party=s insistence on admitting the faults of its members created an atmosphere of perennial suspicion: AEver since the gate their sincerity had been on trial, so to speak, before public opinion.@ Cadres feared going against any of the people=s wishes or opinions lest they be Acriticized@ and judged as oppressors. This created a sense of opposition between the Party and the people.[13] The Communists felt bitter toward their accusers. They Aremembered unfairness and forgot fairness because the atmosphere at the gate had been extreme@ due to the inexperience of those involved and the mistaken approach of the cadres. AProper use of self-and-mutual criticism depended on the full realization that one was in fact dealing with contradictions between friends and allies, not contradictions between oneself and the enemy.@[14]
Hinton=s final analysis of the fanshen movement is optimistic despite these problems. AIn learning to use self-and-mutual criticism,@ he asserts, Athe people had arrived at a new stage in the conduct of the struggle. The days of coercion and beatings, of cops and jails as everyday sanctions of law and order were gone forever. But in mastering this new method the people still had a long way to go. The quality of objectivity necessary could only be the end product of a persistent, long-term effort.@[15] In short, he saw it as a work in progress, but one that was succeeding.
History presents us with a different picture. In later years, the Communist Party would diverge from this course. When the Party invited criticism of its policies during the Hundred Flowers campaign of 1957, it quailed under the intensity of the protests and quickly imposed a crackdown on free speech, and then used this crackdown to purge dissenters within the party.[16] In the Cultural Revolution, all thought other than Mao=s was purged. The Party -- or the Chairman -- became the sole arbiter of right, and challenges from below were not tolerated. As Ranbir Vohra puts it, AMao, who was the greatest proponent of criticism and self-criticism and had encouraged the whole nation to indulge in it, considered himself above criticism. Like the emperors in imperial China, Mao would periodically make public declarations of self-criticism, but he could not accept criticism, which in his eyes amounted to lèse-majesté.@[17]
What went wrong? How did a movement so receptive to self-criticism, so insistent that the masses must lead their leaders, stray so far from its beginnings? A closer examination of those beginnings suggests that it did not stray that far at all. In principle, the peasant masses had the responsibility to monitor and rectify the behavior of those in authority. But before the peasants could do this, Party cadres had to come in and educate them in what the Aproper@ standards were for such judgments. These cadres in turn were instructed in proper policy by the district leaders, who ultimately took their cue from the declarations of Mao Zedong. From the beginning, Mao himself was the ultimate and exclusive arbiter of right and wrong. As Vohra suggests, the Communists= approach, supposedly a wholesale rejection of the old ways, was in fact very much a continuation of the autocratic tradition, and the self-criticism movement merely a recasting of one of the ancient tools of Spence=s Aintellectual approach to rulership.@
Even so, it seemed at the time of Fanshen that Mao=s rule was at least a benevolent dictatorship; that the party=s ideals condemned violence, coercion and punishment and stressed the use of education and patient social pressure to reform behavior judged inappropriate. Why did this policy undergo such a brutal turnaround in later years? Perhaps the key is in what Hinton repeatedly stressed: that the success of this movement depended on bringing about a fundamental transformation in the way human beings thought and behaved. Hinton=s experiences suggest that such reformation can be brought about, but only through a long, slow, delicate process of education and intellectual persuasion. The early communist theorists understood that this approach required great patience, that it would need to go through many intermediate stages before the communist Utopia could be realized. Paradise, they realized, could only be built one mind at a time. The process was projected to take centuries.
But humans are mortal. As Mao aged, he probably became unable to accept that the ideal he had conceived and striven for would not be achieved in his lifetime. Ultimately he was unwilling to settle for the patient, gradual process that he himself had advocated in his younger days, and so he pushed forward with shortcuts, attempting to force Utopia to emerge instantly. The delicacy of the fanshen movement was lost, along with the hope it had offered.
In the final analysis, Mao Zedong himself was only human, as fallible as anyone else. In his position of power, he more than anyone else needed the ability to question himself and to accept legitimate criticism from others. When the principle of self-criticism is applied only to others, when only one person is defining what is right and what is wrong, it becomes accusation and persecution, a hypocritical mockery of the wisdom it aspires to. Ultimately, the ideals of the Communist Party of China were corrupted because one vain, all-too-human man was unable to take his own best advice.
[1]A>Treason by the Book=: When Treason Was Tolerable and Gossip Death,@ The New York Times, Saturday, March 31, 2001.
[2]Excerpted in Hinton, William, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 461.
[3]Ibid., 238-9.
[4]Ibid., 274.
[5]Ibid., 326-9.
[6]Ibid., 345.
[7]Ibid., 365.
[8]Ibid., 471.
[9]Ibid., 505.
[10]Ibid., 395.
[11]Ibid., 453.
[12]Ibid., 556-9.
[13]Ibid., 520-4.
[14]Ibid., 568.
[15]Ibid., 604.
[16]Vohra, Ranbir, China=s Path to Modernization (Prentice-Hall, 2000), 201-4.
[17]Ibid., 214.