TAN Song： Land Reform in the East Sichuan Region
【Editor’s Note: At the China Research Center of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Associate Professor Tan Song (谭松) from Chongqing Normal University delivered a lecture titled "The Land Reform Movement in East Sichuan." His calm yet graphic narration of the brutal tortures inflicted during the early 1950s land reform left the audience unsettled, prompting a female professor to interrupt and ask him to stop. Tan insisted on revealing the cruel truths to prevent history from repeating itself, comparing it to educating people about the atrocities of Auschwitz. He detailed how the land reform, led by Liu Shaoqi (刘少奇), arbitrarily labeled individuals as landlords and employed violent methods to seize wealth, resulting in severe torture and deaths. Tan faced significant challenges in his investigations, including fear among survivors, personal risk, and government detention. Despite losing his job and enduring hardships, he remained committed to uncovering this suppressed history. His dedication ensures that the victims are remembered and the brutal past is not forgotten. 】
In the conference room of the China Research Center at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Associate Professor Tan Song (谭松) from Chongqing Normal University delivered a special lecture titled "The Land Reform Movement in East Sichuan." Outside, the midsummer sun blazed, but inside, a chill of unease permeated the air. As Tan Song calmly narrated and displayed images on the screen, the various tortures of the land reform unfolded before the audience, horrifying enough to send chills down one's spine. The bloody truth of the Communist Party's land reform in East Sichuan in the early 1950s was too cruel for Hong Kong people who grew up in the civilized world.
A female professor from the Chinese University could no longer bear it and suddenly interrupted, asking Tan Song, "Please stop speaking!" Tan Song was somewhat taken aback but firmly replied, "If we do not face the suffering and cruel truth, such history will repeat itself." He cited the example of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where German Nazis slaughtered Jews. "Although the concentration camp was very cruel, teachers still lead students to visit because they should know the truth," he said.
East Sichuan's Land Reform Implemented Liu Shaoqi's Violent Policies
After the lecture, Tan Song admitted that when he first investigated the land reform in East Sichuan, he found it difficult to bear those bloody and tragic scenes. But he wanted to rescue history and refused to let the bloody historical truth be swallowed and submerged. In an article, he quoted a sentence from Mo Li (茉莉), a Hunan writer exiled in Sweden: "To prevent the sky from remaining dark, we must first expose the darkness."
Tan Song's lecture on the land reform in East Sichuan refers to the Chongqing City, Wanxian City, Fuling City, Guang'an City, and Qianjiang area under the jurisdiction of the former Sichuan Province—that is, roughly the current Chongqing Municipality. A native of Chongqing, he began investigating the history of land reform in East Sichuan in 2002, visiting twelve counties and cities and interviewing over 400 participants, including members of land reform work teams, militiamen, landlords' children, insiders, and even landlords who survived severe torture. All interviews were recorded and videotaped. He eventually completed a collection of special interviews on land reform, totaling 360,000 words, which has yet to be published.
The land reform in East Sichuan began in 1951 after the Communist Party occupied Sichuan. Tan Song pointed out that after a year and a half, the land reform completely changed China's two-thousand-year-old land system. It not only destroyed the ethics and cultural traditions of traditional Chinese rural areas and eliminated the rural elite class but also reduced Chinese farmers to serfs who could not migrate freely, bringing long-term adverse consequences to China.
In his investigation, he found that East Sichuan is a poor mountainous area with few large landlords owning thousands of acres of good land. Before the land reform, the average land owned by landlords in East Sichuan was only 14.59 mu per person (about 2.4 acres). Many labeled as landlords were actually self-cultivating farmers or relatively affluent peasants, and the Communist Party's classification of landlords was very arbitrary. Even teachers who did not need to work in the fields were labeled as landlords. In the poorest Wuxi County, a family with two cooking pots was rated as landlords.
He pointed out that Liu Shaoqi (刘少奇), who died during the Cultural Revolution, led the land reform movement, advocated violent land reform, and had blood on his hands. To establish the authority of the new regime, it was necessary to kill to establish power. Therefore, the land reform set up people's courts delegated the power to kill and encouraged killing. A land reform work team member at that time, Dai Tingzhen (戴廷珍), told him in an interview: "After the struggle sessions, we executed people. Everywhere we went, we had to kill people. The Party had to do this to intimidate people." Therefore, for the Party, "the land reform must be a storm, and it must be a bloody storm."
Using Hooligans and Scoundrels to Inflict Brutal Torture
Tan Song stated in his lecture that the bloodiest, most brutal, and most horrifyingly obscene acts during the land reform were not the struggle and grievance meetings but the phase of forcing landlords to surrender "floating wealth"—hidden valuables like gold, silver, and jewelry. If these couldn't be obtained, the greedy activists would resort to all kinds of heinous, brutal, and obscene methods of torture. Such tortures included "carrying the fire basket" (forcing people to carry a metal bucket filled with burning charcoal on their backs), "embracing the fire pillar" (forcing people to hold red-hot steel pipes), "hanging by the head" (tying a rope around the head and hanging the person), "burning the airplane hole" (stripping women naked and burning their lower bodies with fire), "lighting the sky lantern" (encircling the head with clay to form a ring, pouring tung oil (桐油) inside and lighting it, or tying both hands with palms upward, filling the palms with tung oil and lighting it), etc.
A landlord's daughter-in-law who couldn't produce gold or silver was stripped naked and subjected to the torture of roasting alive with charcoal so that oil dripped from her breasts and belly due to the burning.
The active elements and militiamen were mostly hooligans and scoundrels. With violence legalized, they could openly inflict cruel sexual abuse on landlord women. They forced unmarried women to remove their pants, spread their legs, and allowed people to touch their private parts, inserting wooden blocks, iron rods, and de-grained corn cobs into their vaginas, repeatedly thrusting them inside.
A man named Li Mingshu (黎明书) recalled that his sister, Li Qiongyao (黎琼瑶), an unmarried woman in her early twenties at the time, was forced to hand over foreign currency. Unable to do so, she was brutally beaten and forced to drink chili water, then stripped naked and had pig bristles stabbed into her nipples. Unable to endure, she committed suicide by jumping into a pond that day.
A land reform militia company commander, Li Chaogeng (李朝庚), told Tan Song in an interview that during the land reform, there was an unmarried woman named Liang Wenhua (梁文华) in Zhong County who was not a landlord herself. Because she was a famous beauty in the county, she was captured by more than a dozen militiamen and gang-raped to death.
Tan Song said that using hooligans and scoundrels as revolutionary vanguards was an invention of Soviet advisor Borodin (鲍罗廷), who was sent by the Communist International to China to launch the revolution.
At the end of his lecture, Tan Song displayed on the screen the list of victims who died in the land reform that he had investigated. He said that every victim should not be forgotten.
Hardships in Interviewing: Victims Still Harbor Fear
Tan Song mentioned that a Taiwanese scholar once asked him, "How much funding did the government give you for this investigation?" (The audience laughed.) Tan Song said that all his investigations were self-funded, and as long as the government did not persecute him for this, that would be enough. He took risks and self-funded the investigation to rescue history and to seek justice for the victims.
His family was not a victim of the land reform; his parents were both from poor and lower-middle peasant backgrounds. But after coming into contact with the truth, he realized that his education had deceived him, and his sense of justice was aroused.
He said his investigation was very arduous. First, the interviewees were scattered in the remote and impoverished mountainous areas and forests of East Sichuan without telephone contact, making visits very difficult. Second, the land reform era was long ago, and few people from that time are still alive.
Tan Song heard that a woman named Feng Guangzhen (冯光珍), who had suffered the "lighting the sky lantern" torture, was still alive, and he immediately rushed to interview her. Feng, eighteen at the time and still a student, had her hands disabled due to torture. Tan Song interviewed her in the morning, and the unfortunate woman passed away that afternoon.
Third, fear. Chinese landlords, rich peasants, and their children were the most severely victimized during the Mao Zedong era and thus harbored the deepest fear. Although the Mao era has long passed, the fear remains, and many people dare not accept interviews.
As an interviewer, Tan Song himself was also very afraid because he had been detained by the Chongqing authorities for 39 days for conducting an investigation into rightists in East Sichuan and had just been released not long ago. Moreover, during his bail, he was ordered not to leave the Chongqing area, so he conducted interviews secretly.
Land reform involves the revolutionary legitimacy of the Chinese Communist regime and is the most sensitive forbidden zone in modern Chinese history. Few scholars dare to touch it, and most research is based on documents. It is probably unprecedented for someone like Tan Song to conduct in-depth, large-scale interviews in a region to create an oral history.
Gao Qi (高琦), the deputy director of the China Research Center who hosted the event, pointed out that Tan Song is the first mainland scholar to talk about land reform at their center.
However, the investigation of the land reform in East Sichuan is only a part of the long road of civil investigations that Tan Song has embarked on in the past decade to rescue history. His journey on this path is related to his friend, Chongqing cultural figure, Wang Kang (王康).
Not Regretting The Chosen Path
Tan Song and Wang Kang initially collaborated to unearth the wartime history of Chongqing during the Anti-Japanese War. Tan served as the executive editor of the magazine "Chongqing and the World" (《重庆与世界》) at the Chongqing Foreign Affairs Office. With Wang Kang's strong support, they produced a special issue on the wartime capital, fully affirming that the center of China's resistance against Japan was Chongqing, not Yan'an. Because this violated the Party's main ideological narrative, Tan Song was forced to resign.
In 2000, the two began investigating the stories behind the Red Guard Cemetery in Shapingba, Chongqing, intending to make a documentary. But soon after starting, they were stopped halfway by the police due to someone reporting them.
After losing his job, Tan Song had no livelihood. At this time, Wang Kang introduced him to the Three Gorges Group of the Chongqing Academy of Social Sciences for research work. But on his first day, as he entered the academy, he saw a notice about an afternoon meeting to criticize Falun Gong. Disgusted, he hesitated about taking the job and consulted Wang Kang. Wang said, "It's fine not to go; maintain inner freedom," which finally made him decide not to accept the position. Since then, he has never held a public office and decided to use this time without a job to investigate the rightists.
Tan Song's father, Tan Xianyin (谭显殷), was a cadre who joined the Party in 1947. In 1957, while serving as the propaganda minister of the Chongqing Communist Youth League Municipal Committee, he was labeled a rightist and classified as an anti-party element, sent to labor reform in the desolate Changshou Lake in East Sichuan. After the Anti-Rightist Movement, Changshou Lake became Chongqing's labor reform base, detaining 627 rightists and historical counter-revolutionaries. It also accommodated 1,030 demoted cadres with various issues and 1,455 students with problematic backgrounds. This vast, uninhabited lake area bore the suffering and tears of the rightists and was East Sichuan's "Jiabiangou" (夹边沟—a notorious labor camp).
On March 8, 2001, Tan Song took his layoff certificate and, encouraged by his parents, decided to investigate the history of the rightist labor reform at Changshou Lake. Unsure how to tell his wife face-to-face, he hesitated for half a month before writing a 10,000-word letter explaining why he decided to give up finding a job to make money and must go to Changshou Lake. He gained his wife's understanding and support.
This was the most difficult time for Tan Song; he had no savings at home, and he had no income for ten full months. Travel expenses were a challenge; he was penniless. He rented boats into the lake eight times, searching for those involved. After three years, he completed the harrowing history of Changshou Lake. In 2011, he published the 500,000-word "Changshou Lake—1957 Chongqing Changshou Lake Rightist Interviews" (《长寿湖——一九五七年重庆长寿湖右派采访录》) in the United States.
Halfway through his interviews, on July 2, 2002, he was detained by the authorities for his investigation. They accused him of "collecting the dark side of society," saying he intended to "settle accounts for the Party's crimes" and that he had committed "anti-Party and anti-government propaganda." At that time, he had just gotten a job at "China Magazine" (《中华杂志》), but after only two months' salary, he lost his freedom and his job. Although detained for only 39 days, the authorities warned him that after his release, he was not allowed to leave the Chongqing area or conduct further investigations; otherwise, he would be detained for five years. Therefore, his subsequent investigations had to be conducted privately and quietly.
He speculated that because Wang Kang suggested inviting Liu Binyan (刘宾雁), a prominent rightist then exiled in the United States, to write a preface for his interviews, and since Wang Kang was a sensitive figure under surveillance in Chongqing, their overseas communications alerted the authorities.
During this period, he also collaborated with Wang Kang to produce a five-episode documentary about Chongqing's eight-year history as the wartime capital during the Anti-Japanese War, "The Bombing of Chongqing" (《重庆大轰炸》), which was broadcast on CCTV and Phoenix TV. Because he was a sensitive figure, he could only appear under the pen name "Mu Gong" (木公) in the production credits.
Born in 1955, Tan Song attended university after the Cultural Revolution. After graduation, he taught at Chongqing Institute of Construction Engineering (later merged into Chongqing University). In 1991, he was promoted to associate professor, the youngest at the school at the time. His father, rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution, served as deputy propaganda minister in Chongqing—a legitimate "princeling" (太子党). Had Tan Song confirmed, he would have undoubtedly risen within the Party system. However, his unconventional thoughts and ideals made him incompatible with this system. Ultimately, he left the Party framework, walked his own path, lived a life of modest means, and did meaningful work.
Having chosen this path, Tan Song had moments of hesitation. He lost his job seven times, once being unemployed for a year and a half. Without a job, he had no social or medical insurance and relied on his wife, a doctor, for support. He felt depressed, thinking he had only passion and was too impractical. It wasn't until he met Wang Kang in 2000, a friend equally unorthodox but living freely, that he gained confidence.
In recent years, he has taught as a contract instructor at Yucai College of Southwest Normal University and the International Business College of Chongqing Normal University, teaching courses like "Introduction to Western Culture," "History of Sino-Foreign Cultural Exchanges," "English," and "News Interview and Writing." While imparting knowledge, he also taught principles of humanity, bringing universal values into the classroom. Deeply loved by students; some regarded him as a spiritual father. He spent all his spare time on self-funded historical investigations.
Compared with his peers who now hold high positions and enjoy substantial incomes, he lags in fame and fortune. But he feels no regret. He told me that he does not regret his choice; he feels his life is exciting and valuable. Recalling his past hardships, he laughs heartily, taking pleasure in them.
After completing the East Sichuan land reform investigation, Tan Song began new civil investigation projects, determined to continue on this path. In prison, when officers interrogated him, they accused him of being extreme, focusing solely on society's dark sides, unable to see "bright" aspects. In the postscript of "Changshou Lake" (《长寿湖》), he responded:
"Their words made me reflect. Indeed, how have I become an annoying fly, chasing after blood and gore all these years? But seeing so many people, so many writers, singing praises and greatness while so much blood, tears, and truth are ignored, I can only choose the latter. This life, I'll just let it be; I willingly become a piece of rat feces, spoiling that pot of bright soup."