EDITOR'S NOTE:
History is a mirror of realtiy. But does the official mirror reflect things as they are or were? Not always, says professor Zhang Letian of Fudan University, an expert on People's Communes. To present a lesser-known side of history, Zhang has been scouring rural Haining in northern Zhejiang Province for original documentation of agricultural life. He spoke to Shanghai Daily reporter Ni Tao last week about what his studies can tell us about a China old and new. This is the second of a three-part interview.

Q: Your collection includes diaries and autobiographies, which are subjective. Will reliance on them in research affect the objectivity of the findings?

A: If we want to know what social life looked like in the 1960s, there are several things we can peruse for hints.

One is newspapers. But you know newspapers published in the 60s are spotty evidence. Another thing is memory. But neither can memory, or oral history, be fully trusted. Memory can be incorrect due to narrators' old age and it is often influenced by personal values or life experiences of the narrators.

People have an incentive to hide the past if that reflects badly upon them. Few people now admit to beating others during the "cultural revolution" (1966-1976), so who inflicted the violence? The same is true of the purge of landowners during the land reform era.

Although a diary is personal and subjective, it can tell the truth better than any other materials can.

During the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), rural cadres inflated grain yield figures to fantasy levels and cooked the books to please their superiors. But the local version of accounting information was not falsified, for it was closely associated with distribution of food, agricultural goods and tools. How could it be bogus? That's why I insist on collecting rural, firsthand accounting books.

Q: Some antiques like the property deeds you collected predate 1949 and are now treated like heirloom if they survived the "cultural revolution." Why did the owners donate them to you?

A: I enjoy good reputation in my hometown, where everyone knows what I am up to with these relics.

Rural China has changed dramatically and past and current lifestyles are poles apart.

I deeply regret the fact that our children now have little idea of how their parents once lived. That's where my enterprise kicks in, to reconnect the future generations to our ancestral roots.

Villagers know I'm doing this archive thing not for fame or profit. Perhaps it's that idealism and sense of historical responsibility that garnered me so many people's support.



Q: How do unofficial documents complement orthodox history, or rectify it?

A: I will cite some examples.

How serious was the famine from 1958 to 1961? Nobody can say for sure. All we have now is vague memory and rough estimates of the number of people who starved to death.

Families who suffered hardships or persecution and later went overseas and received education also gave their accounts of the famine. But there are few unbiased records that illustrate how much food each rural household was offered monthly.

I have some solid information about food rationing among 400 households in Haining over a period of four years. The true extents of the famine will no longer be a mystery if such information abounds.

Another example is that we often say China's national economy was verging on bankruptcy on the eve of reform and opening up.

But how can we assert that the People's Communes were to blame if we don't have enough proof? Dubious official statistics certainly don't count as proof.

However, if my research covers the whole nation, things will be a lot more different.

Suppose I survey 100 villages and each village is comprised of 400 households, then we'll know the food rationing situation of 40,000 families. Then I'll develop a database and figure out how life really was for Chinese farmers from 1962 to 1982, the year of the People's Commune's demise. Because 40,000 is considered large enough in sociology and statistics to be a representative sample and significant.



Q: What did you discover about land reform in Haining? Was it as violent as it's portrayed in films and literature?

A: There are several major differences.

First, the percentage of land concentrated in the hands of landowners wasn't that disproportionate. And the number of landless peasants who benefited from the reform was not high either.

Generally speaking, land ownership is relatively even in Haining and the surrounding areas. There were exceptions, but on the whole, most land wasn't controlled by a few. Therefore, only 40 percent of families' land ownerships changed as a result of the reform.

Second, land owners weren't invariably wicked as they were said to be.

Some peasants became land owners through hard work and purchases of a few more acres of plots than others. They leased out the plots in line with time-honored customs. Of course there were bad apples who crushed the poor and murdered people. But can we say private entrepreneurs are all bad just because some of them abuse workers? Definitely not.

In many cases, there wasn't much animus between landowners and peasants hired to work for them. Oftentimes land owners who were stripped penniless and tortured in the day were given back their properties at night by neighbors who felt guilty about the spoils. Grabbing others' legally acquired properties equaled theft in the eyes of honest peasants.

In some cases, antagonistic class struggle had to be introduced. A few "bad elements" who hogged a lot of land and did kill people were publicly tried, followed by execution.

Third, some revisionist historians dismissed the land reform altogether, arguing that it was a robbery of good and industrious people by violence-prone rural scoundrels and thugs. That is a gross misinterpretation.

True, thugs least bound by moral creed were active in the reform. But the reform was also a process of screening people's credibilities. Scoundrels got kicked out when grassroots governments were formed. Those cadres elected to rule were mostly good.



Q: Can we gauge the changing attitude of peasants in Haining toward the Communes from documents?

A: A few people objected to agricultural collectivization at the beginning.

But after 1958, opposition was rare. There was no way of leaving communes. Gradually communes were accepted, so much so that when the reform and opening up started, most people in Haining opposed implementation of the Household Contract Responsibility System.

Peasants clung to communes. For them memories of communes were not filled with miseries only. Life was above all abundant. And politics were absolutely clean back then, with little trace of the social decay we've seen so often today, like gambling, prostitution and theft.

Public security was perfect. That's partly why many are nostalgic about the Maoist era, because in many ways it was quite good.