Casting (Off) Their Stinking Airs: Chinese Intellectuals and Land Reform, 1946–52

Abstract

After observing land reform in early 1951, Wu Jingchao (吴景潮 1901–68) was left with what he would soon describe as an “unforgettable memory”. Like so many of the images to emerge from the campaigns to restructure agrarian land holdings in revolutionary China, Wu Jingchao’s memory centered on a struggle meeting, in which class enemies were publicly denounced by their fellow villagers. The climax of the meeting occurred when a peasant jumped onto the struggle stage, “ripped off his shirt and began beating on his chest”, before grabbing a landlord by the collar and pointing accusingly in his face. Wu’s tale serves as a useful entry point into questioning and problematizing standard images of land reform, for such images of peasants and landlords, freshly labeled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), inform common understandings of the campaigns. However, focusing only on the scene itself neglects the crucial role played by the observer and narrator, Qinghua University professor of sociology Wu Jingchao. In her seminal text, Literary Dissent in Communist China, Merle Goldman has suggested that the land reform campaigns affected Chinese intellectuals only indirectly. In contrast, this article will argue that China’s educated elite were of crucial importance to land reform, as vast numbers of them would, like Wu Jingchao,