Silage Choppers and Snake Spirits The Lives and Struggles of Two Americans in Modern China Third Edition Dao-Yuan Chou Foreign Languages Press Foreign Languages Press Collection “New Roads” #2 A collection directed by Christophe Kistler Contact – [email protected] https://foreignlanguages.press Paris, 2019 Third Edition ISBN: 978-2-491182-02-1 This book is under license Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ For the people in the world who have tied their struggle inextricably to the struggle of others… and… For Sid and Joan, who insisted that I ‘get off my butt and do something for the world,’ and gave me many tools with which I could try. Acknowledgements Thanks to my mother, without whom I never would have made it to that small Agricultural Machinery Experiment Station in China, and who has been a personal and political compass throughout my life. She sets a loving if nearly unattainable exam- ple and makes me a better person for trying to follow. Many thanks to the people who were unwavering in their support for this long project: to Sid and Joan who trusted me to tell their story, family and friends, who if they ever doubted that I would finish it never showed it, the Philadelphia Chinatown youth who taught me about practice, IBON staff and board, and all the people who participated in making this book so much better. Second Edition: Warm thanks to Ann Tomkins for her invaluable assistance in copyediting and clarification. She will be remembered always for her tenacious com- mitment to struggle for the people of the world. Third edition: A big thank you to Nancy for her enthusiasm for this book and her enormous contribution towards making this edition a better one, and also to the young Maoists in new organizations popping up all around the world, who, through their earnest and serious study and practice, have given me a new understanding of how this specific history could be useful. Contents Author’s Note v Note About this Edition vii Forward to the First Edition ix Chronology of Significant Events xi Prologue xviii Map of China xix Section 1 Formation 1 Chapter 1 Hinton 2 Chapter 2 Bennington 12 Chapter 3 Engst 15 Chapter 4 Cornell Ag 19 Chapter 5 The Gadget 26 Chapter 6 Divergence 38 Chapter 7 The Institute 43 Chapter 8 Relief and Rehabilitation 47 Section 2 Transition 52 Chapter 9 Yanan 53 Chapter 10 Pushing Off 68 Chapter 11 China Welfare 72 Chapter 12 The Underground 77 Chapter 13 Liberation 80 Chapter 14 Tile Cave Town 83 Chapter 15 Transport 85 Chapter 16 Convergence 91 Section 3 Production 94 Chapter 17 The Iron Factory 95 Chapter 18 The Fort 101 Chapter 19 Three Border Farm 117 Chapter 20 Peace 130 Chapter 21 Xian 137 Chapter 22 City Dairy 142 Chapter 23 Grassy Plains 153 Section 4 Contradictions Within 165 Chapter 24 Movement 166 Chapter 25 A Lesson—Part 1 173 Chapter 26 Movement Continued 182 Chapter 27 A Lesson—Part 2 185 Chapter 28 Great Leap 189 Chapter 29 Reconciliation 218 Chapter 30 White Terror 228 Section 5 Paper Revolution 239 Chapter 31 The Superstructure 240 Chapter 32 Snake Spirits 255 Chapter 33 Breakthrough 292 Chapter 34 Turning Over 298 Chapter 35 Unite and Conquer 307 Chapter 36 Red Star 319 Section 6 Dissolution 343 Chapter 37 Wind 344 Epilogue 361 Index 365 Author’s Note Author’s Note Shortly after IBON published the first edition of this book in 2009, I went to China to see Joan Hinton to present it to her with it. I read nervously to her for a week and felt tremendous relief when Joan, never long on praise, told me that the content was accurate and that she thought I was a “pretty good writer.” She died the following summer. I feel very fortunate that my life intersected with Joan and Sid’s during a time when they were both completely clear-headed, physiologically and politically, and ready to tell their stories. Their clarity, good humor and support enabled me to write this book. It also had a profound effect on my life, making me a deeper and sharper thinker, more principled and self-critical, and most importantly, instilled in me the necessity of becoming an engaged participant in society and the world. This effect—what I call the Hinton-Engst Effect—was not limited to me, nor the handful of young people from the US who somehow found their way to the Xiao Wang Zhuang Dairy over the years, nor the steady stream of visitors from all over China and the world. The scope of that effect can be measured in part by the reaction to Joan’s death. In the US, news of her passing made the mainstream press, primarily because of her work with Enrico Fermi on the Manhattan Project. But the vast major- ity of remembrances, memorials and tributes came from people who had experienced the “Hinton-Engst Effect,” and had it play a part in their commitment to try to change the world. Their focus was not so much on Joan Hinton the atomic physicist, but Joan Hinton the dairy designer, the internationalist and the revolutionary. Even if they did often joke about meeting Marx in heaven, and even though Sid always said he would save me an extra heavy shovel for when we were shoveling coal together in hell, both were staunch materialists to the last. They believed in the impor- tance of dedicating your life to making a better world, not the idea of being rewarded after your death. They believed in the inevitability of history, and in the determination and passion people have in the struggle for their own liberation. Sid told me once that his only regret late in life was that he wouldn’t live long enough to see China and the world turn from the capitalist road and embark again on the path of socialist revolu- tion. They believed that their generation had done what they could on their historical stage, and that the next great leaps in advancing history were up to the next generation of actors. I believe as they did that the Chinese revolution and the dogged 30 year fight to build socialism did not depend on heroic individuals in the main—that Joan and Sid’s lives and deaths as individual lives did not alter that evolutionary path. But the manner in which they lived, walking away from all the material comforts, professional accolades and opportunities that they and their families had in the first of first worlds, is a testament to the notion that what you believe is more important that what you can acquire, and that what you gain by throwing your lot in with the great majority of the people of the world to raise up all of humanity is more satisfying and precious v Silage Choppers and Snake Spirits than material wealth and ego. The fact that Joan and Sid, with all of their trials and triumphs, persevered to the end in service to that notion shatters the shell of cynicism, grounds and gives legs to idealism and provides the lasting inspiration that people in struggle need for sustenance in deeply contradictory times. This is the Hinton-Engst Effect. Felt in China, in the Philippines, in the US, in the world. To borrow a line from Bill Hinton: They put their shoulders to the wheel of history and pushed it forward. The next historical stage has been set. Sid, it seems, was accurate in his assess- ment of change once again brewing from the Left in China. And the culmination of all of their complex and rich experiences—heroic moments and human failings—has continued to germinate in this generation of actors, some of whom are undoubtedly as principled, human and revolutionary as Joan Hinton and Sid Engst. Dao-yuan Chou May 2011 vi Note about this Ediction Note about this Edition It’s been ten years since the first publication ofSilage Choppers and Snake Spirits. In China, this decade has only seen the intensification of the sharp divide between the rich and the poor, the recognized city residents and the migrants from the countryside living in slums, and the connected party members and everyone else. The re-emergent Left has faced many contradictions not the least of which is trying to link and apply the revolutionary experiences of the past to the extremely different conditions of the present. This critical task to a new revolutionary movement in China depends in part on a thorough examination and understanding of what actually happened in modern Chinese history—especially as that history has been so exactingly rewritten and erased, distorted and manipulated to tell a different story, propagating a different ideology. While the revised edition in 2011 corrected many of the typographical and for- matting mistakes, many still remained. In addition, over the last decade, my under- standing about what aspects of the rich and complicated lives of Joan Hinton and Sid Engst might be relevant and useful rather than simply interesting has grown clearer. The original intended audience for whom I wrote the book was one unfamiliar with modern Chinese history and exposed only to the history of the Chinese revolution from a Western and generally anti-communist perspective. The book did make its way to some of that audience, but many of those readers found the latter half of the book with all the unfamiliar Chinese names and references to specific historical events confusing.