The Silent Class:the Analysis Of Behaviors And Factors Of Middle Peasants In Land Reform

Land Reform plays an important role in the Chinese new-democratic revolution. The author has the honor to take part in the oral history work of land reform in the China Rural Institute of the Central China Normal University between 2014 and 2016. The author interviews ten old persons in Yiyang County of Luoyang City in Henan Province, including eight persons who were middle peasants in the land reform and the other were poor. The author consults the relevant documents and literatures and combines with oral history, trying to do the research on the middle peasants’behaviors and factors.In the land reform, the middle peasants are a special part since they are neither the object of struggle, nor the main force of struggle. The behavior of the middle peasants has important influence on the development of the land reform movement as they are a considerable proportion of farmers in land reform. In this paper, the author will sum up the behavior’s characteristics of middle peasants in the land reform in accordance with the oral material of ten old men from six different villages of Luoyang in Henan. In the early stage of the land reform, people united without the middle peasants, had meeting but kept them in silence. On the contrast, poor peasant associations became the core, decisive composition, and middle peasants had no voice; during the process of the land reform, middle peasants was "involved in" the movement. They struggled but not with hearts; they watched that their rights and interests being harmed and hand over their land but without words. In fact middle peasants became a silent class.In this paper, the internal and external reasons of this behavior’s characteristics are analyzed on the basis of summarizing the characters of the behavior. Internal motivation is because of security concerns interests of rational people and more security considerations; the second is traditional rural values ethical standards of good and evil and to be a follower of behavior logic. External motivation is for the peasants in the countryside Communist policy:"the first is to let the rural peasants recognize the existence of class antagonisms; the second is to allow peasants to participate in the organization to which farmers’ associations; the third is to make middle peasants" involved "to movement; at last, it cannot let the peasants become the main farmers’ associations and leaders." The effect of these policies is the fuzzy class consciousness of middle peasants; middle peasants were passively involved in land reform and became a silent class.