TRASHFUTURE - PREVIEW Writtenology 5 - Fanshen

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village is a 1966 book by academic William Hinton, documenting the experience of one particularly poor Chinese village of early efforts at land reform. It is almost opaquely dense, and yet very illuminating. Get the full episode on Patreon! If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture   *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We’re touring the Midlands, the North, and (one city in) Scotland in May! We’ll be in Birmingham on May 14, Leeds on May 15, Manchester on May 16, and Glasgow on May 21. Tickets are available here: https://www.trashfuture.co.uk/events   *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows and check out a recording of Milo’s special PINDOS available on YouTube here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRI7uwTPJtg *ROME ALERT* Milo and Phoebe have teamed up with friend of the show Patrick Wyman to finally put their classical education to good use and discuss every episode of season 1 of Rome. You can download the 12 episode series from Bandcamp here (1st episode is free): https://romepodcast.bandcamp.com/album/rome-season-1 Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

But they create this association of like poor peasants of hired laborers and they kind of like successfully steer it from being an anti collaborator struggle to an anti landlord struggle. And this is when they find a receptive audience. And this is when they get the terror is because the longer it's been, the more people think, well, maybe the Kuomintang's not coming back. And we're now being sort of like told explicitly, like this is a class struggle. And there are like pages and pages of sort of like heartbreaking details of abuse by landlords. Hinton asks one guy, like, you know, what was the happiest day in your life? And he says, I haven't had one. It's been better since liberation, but I've never had like a good day in my life.

And that's heavy. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And to imagine the squandering of a life like that is he says, like, you could not ask someone about what it was like before before the revolution without them crying. And yeah, absolutely. So what of course happens is more struggle sessions and the chief landlords, the priest as well as like gone by this point, they've fled. What you do have are there sort of like compradors, right, their retainers, their families, people who like manage their lands, their agents. You have the PMC. Yeah, exactly. And again, you can see these sessions like lurching out of control. And the second anyone like lays hands on one of these people for the first time,

almost before they know it, they're beating them to death. They say one guy like they beat him for more time than it takes to eat a meal. And yeah, it sort of like becomes incidental. And it's sort of like the way that Hinton describes this is to me, sort of very, very blackly comic is they bring in the leader of the sort of the church's land management society, the carry on society. Who are? Yeah, who matron. But this guy is like, he's not a landlord, he's a middle peasant, but he just manages their affairs for them. And that's that's sufficient that as he puts it, feeling against him mounted to such a pitch that he was beaten to death. You know what this reminds me of actually, it sort of reminds me of a kind of worked example

of what like Franz Fanon writes about, which is because Franz Fanon writes about sort of anti-colonial anti-colonial violence, right? But, you know, that fundamentally, right, the relationship is one of someone who is brutally exploited to the point where you could, I think you could remove the, you can't remove the colonial dimension for Fanon, obviously. But the psychological dimension of of having a relationship with a landlord, such that, you know, he wears a long gown that he never has to work as long fingernails and all this. And you have never had a good day in your life and cannot think about your own life without crying. You know, it's sort of, you understand where almost the need for that catharsis comes from.

And it says that it's almost like that the actual like perpetrators of these deeds kind of like escaped and left others in their place to sort of to take on, you know, that to take on that sort of fury. Yeah, they still kind of win. Like they just escaped the nationalist areas. The worst place to be in a revolution is not to be in the 1%. It's to be the person who is like left behind by the 1%. Yeah, it's the it's you're the sucker, you're the patsy. Yes, you know, that that rich landlord, he's fine. He's like his grandson is now a manager at TSMC. Yeah, he's fine. Yeah. But so what they do next is under the supervision of the Communist Party, which is still sort of like not really separable from the army at this point. They they they fancien, they have this

meeting of redistribution, where they take all of the the goods that they've sort of like seized from these people, which is a storehouse full of like suits of clothes and tools and mirrors and bowls and stuff. And they sort of like they grade people by poverty and they let them in to have like first choice, second choice and so on. Supermarket sweep or whatever the equivalent is in the UK. Yeah, exactly. And like the way that Hinton describes this is never since the world began, there've been a day like this. And so people are just coming home with like, like a mirror, for instance, because that's the thing that they wanted from their landlord's house. There's a story about a guy who like the one thing he's like sort of like middle peasant,

the one thing he's really lacking as far as he sees it as like he needs a big jar to hold all of his grain in. So he carries this big jar back, and he's sort of like puns on the way back. And someone asked him, oh, he must have like fan shen and he said, yeah, I fan shen an empty body. Like I sort of like I turned over a vessel. It's fun. It is. But so the problem is, as we've sort of established, Longwell is a poor village. And it's not it's sort of like this is being organized at a very local level. There's like, there's a county administration, sure. But like, it's all decentralized. And so what you have in Longbow, the, you know, the resources that you have there, that's it, right. And so you have these demands for, for more land coming from below.

From from people who are still poor, who have like taken this stuff who have fan shen, right, who have turned over. And what they have to show for it has made them slightly better off. But they're still by anyone's standards, including theirs, desperately poor. And you have this sort of logic, well, clearly what that means is we haven't confiscated enough. There is like hidden wealth somewhere. It has to be found. And so what this leads to is this treasure hunt, where you're looking for because landlords had tried to hide things, they had like buried gold and buried silver, they had like stashed it with families, they thought would be sympathetic. But what this leads to is like breaking open tombs.

There's a lot of torture at this point, where they're trying to like extract information from people who might have sort of like hidden gold, or might know where it is. And this is the sort of like the really sort of dark part is where they're sort of like they're torturing people. Particularly it's women, because landlords and sort of like the richer peasants, they leave their wives behind on the basis that fuck them. And so, you know, these women find themselves being tortured to like locate this gold, some of which they find, but it's not when it's no one near enough. And especially since what they need is land, which there is never enough of. And having sort of like thus burned their way through all of these, they then get to feudal

tales, which is like, we're getting into like Khmer Rouge stuff here of like, okay, you're not a landlord, you're a peasant, but like, was your father a landlord? Was your grandfather a landlord? And because landlords had both more opportunities to have children and also to then disinherit them, you know, you're not a landlord at all. And would you be surprised to learn that certain members of the village cadre, I say cadre, I think Americans like Cader, C-A-D-R-E. It just means cadre, we could say. Yeah, in this context, it just means like person in a position of responsibility doesn't have to be a communist actually. But certain party cadres like really like to use another proverb, mount the horse to like exercise power in a familiar way.

And curiously, it's the cops. I didn't see that one coming. Yeah, they're like the village police and the village militia who have been in charge of all of this sort of like interrogation and searching sort of feel like they're entitled to special privileges. In particular, we have this sort of like click formed around the deputy village had a guy called Wang Yulai, who has a great line in this book, actually, I can discover enemy agents without even putting on my spectacles Wang Yulai declaimed for a skeptical audience. My beard is a high officials beard and whoever is ordered by me to die must die.