The first time I read "Blood Red Land: An Interview with the CCP's Land Reform", it was an electronic version transferred by a friend a few years ago. I couldn't sleep for days after reading it. In his article "In Memory of Liu Hezhen", Lu Xun said: "I have never been afraid to use the worst malice to speculate on the Chinese people, but I didn't expect it, nor did I believe it would be so cruel." He had never seen it before. The CCP's violent land reform, I have not read this "Blood Red Land", otherwise this sentence will be rewritten. At that time, I wanted to write a book review about it. But a friend told me that the author, Tan Song, is an associate professor at a university within the system. He wants to continue his interview work with rightists and landlord survivors. He doesn’t want to surface. Of course I respect his own wishes. However, I soon heard that Tan Song was expelled from the university where he taught, threatened by national security, and then went into exile in the United States—this is the inevitable fate of intellectuals who insist on telling the truth in a totalitarian country. In 2018, at an academic seminar on land reform held in New York, I happened to be placed in the same room as Tan Song. He is a typical Sichuanese in appearance, short and shrewd, with bright eyes. He talks about the investigation and research on the rightists and land reform that brought him disaster. I listened to him talk for hours that night,
and saw the tremendous strength and courage within him that made it possible to document the massacre of land reform, which was largely forgotten—even though it took Pay the heavy price of marriage breakdown and exile in a foreign country after middle age. The land reform was an almost forgotten massacre in the history of the CCP's rule. There are fewer people who recorded and studied the land reform than those who recorded and studied the anti-rightist, Cultural Revolution, June 4th and other events. Most of the victims of persecution in the anti-rightist movement were intellectuals, and the survivors had the ability to speak, and a large amount of written materials survived; during the Cultural Revolution, many of the victims were bureaucrats and intellectuals. wedding photo retouching services The situation of the June 4th massacre can be “indicted” to a limited extent; not only are Western journalists recording the scenes of the June 4 massacre in detail right now, but also exiled intellectuals and student leaders, as well as the “Tiananmen Mothers” group are tirelessly recording and talking about it. . In contrast, Tan Song found during the interview that many victims of land reform and their family members were still mired in fear: "Fear has been internalized into an individual's internal automatic control program. When it comes to that period of history, Whether in a remote rural area or in an urban secret room, the program automatically activates the anti-'leakage' function, making it impossible for unfamiliar visitors to take advantage of.”
The CCP's long totalitarian rule has succeeded in rooting fear into everyone's heart: "The rich and their descendants have not only been robbed of their wealth, but their bodies have also been destroyed and their spirits destroyed and conquered." My mother's family was one of those Typical case: My great-grandfather was a famous doctor in the town. He worked hard to start a business, ran a family with diligence, opened a pharmacy, and purchased land. As a result, he became a crime that affects his children and grandchildren. My grandfather was kidnapped and killed, bound with cowhide rope for several days, and maggots grew from the wound; my grandma was forced to crawl on the ground with a grinding wheel on her back. But they kept me tight-lipped and said nothing about these experiences until after they died, and my mother didn't tell me a little bit of memory. As the "black five categories" (local, rich, anti, bad, and right, these five identities sometimes overlap) and their families, most of them try their best to get rid of this shameful mark, and they will not remember their past encounters. Tan Song himself came from a family of senior CCP officials and was part of the ruling class and vested interests. Under the shadow of his parents, with his roots and bright roots, he is smart and capable. However, he chose to stand with the "untouchables" such as the rightists and landlords, to speak up for the victims, marginalized, voiceless, and even to make himself one of them. Tan Song's work interviewing the survivors of the land reform and their descendants is an immortal undertaking that fills the gaps in history. Violent Land Reform was a class slaughter bigger than the Holocaust Tan Song was intimidated and arrested by the CCP's secret police because of his oral history of land reform, which shows that the CCP is very afraid of his atrocities being recorded and exposed. By falsifying history and brainwashing the people, the CCP achieves what George Orwell said, “Whoever controls the history controls the future.” What’s more tragic is that in the Western context, the CCP’s tyra