Source: Sinosphere, NYT (7/26/16)
Grandson of China’s Most-Hated Landlord Challenges Communist Lore
By VANESSA PIAO
Liu Xiaofei, the grandson of Liu Wencai, who has long been held up as the epitome of the evil landlord of pre-Communist society, telling visitors to the Liu Family Manor Museum in Anren, China, that most of the exhibits are fake. CreditVanessa Piao/The New York Times
ANREN, China — To many Chinese, Liu Wencai is the archetype of the despotic landlord from pre-Communist days, one who exploited his tenants, tortured those who fell behind on rent in a “water dungeon” and forced new mothers to breast-feed him as a longevity therapy.
But his grandson Liu Xiaofei, 70, has spent the past two decades trying to prove that his grandfather was not only a good man, but actually aided the Communist forces in Sichuan Province.
“The ruling party has no integrity, so I have to tell the truth,” Mr. Liu said in an interview.
He said he was not seeking his grandfather’s formal rehabilitation but simply trying to establish that the government fabricated stories to advance its political goals.
“By inciting hatred through propaganda, they turned humans into beasts,” he said. “I want to tell the truth so our nation won’t repeat these mistakes.”
Mr. Liu, a retired oil-well construction worker, spends his days at a computer in his apartment in Longchang, in southern Sichuan, working on a book based on research that includes more than 1,000 interviews.
Liu Wencai, right, standing in front of Wencai Middle School, which he built in 1942. With him is Gao Shuyuan, the school’s first principal. CreditWu Hongyuan
When he travels to the town of Anren, where his grandfather’s manor was turned into a museum in 1959 to showcase evil deeds he is reported to have committed, Mr. Liu gives impassioned speeches to visitors, pointing out which exhibits — essentially, all of them, he says — are fake.
Mr. Liu said it was a single sentence his mother uttered in the late 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, that sent him on his journey, a one-man battle even family members consider doomed in a tightening political climate.
“The underground Communists’ command headquarters was right in our manor,” he said she told him. “Those words were engraved in my heart.”
On a misty morning, Mr. Liu walked past cafes, bars and design stores lining the streets of Anren, now a tourist destination known as the township of museums, for the Liu family manors and other cultural sites. A luxury hotel has been built for vacationers and parents visiting their children at the Confucius International School, which promises to prepare pupils for top foreign universities and boasts of being housed in a school that Liu Wencai built in 1942, where tuition fees were waived for poor but talented pupils.
Many residents seem to remember Liu Wencai favorably.
“If you ask if people here think Liu Wencai was good, that goes without saying,” said Dai Rongyao, 89, who was selling embroidered handicrafts.
Liu Wencai, born in 1887, amassed huge wealth in the 1920s in the Yangtze River port of Yibin, dominating lucrative businesses including the opium and weapons trades under the wing of his younger brother, Liu Wenhui, a Nationalist warlord.
In 1933, Liu Wenhui retreated to the Tibetan region of Kham, after losing a battle to a warlord nephew, and Liu Wencai returned to his hometown, Anren, and sponsored road, water and electricity projects as well as the school.
The life-size sculptures that make up Rent Collection Yard depict Liu Wencai as a despotic landlord exploiting destitute peasants. CreditWu Hongyuan
In 1942, Liu Wenhui, long at odds with the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, met with Zhou Enlai and began clandestinely cooperating with his Communists.
In 1946, at the start of the Chinese civil war, Liu Wencai financed a Communist guerrilla force of around 50 people while allowing its command headquarters to be set up in his manor, said Mr. Liu, who said he learned this from a close aide to Liu Wencai who has since died. (A provincial government history says that underground Communists took advantage of Liu Wencai’s conflict with a rival to secure weapons from him.)
Liu Wencai died in October 1949, the same month that Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic. In December, his brother Liu Wenhui openly joined forces with the Communists, and the Nationalists retreated from Sichuan to Taiwan.
The Liu family, like many wealthy Chinese, considered fleeing to Hong Kong, fearing what might happen under the new Communist government, Mr. Liu said. But Liu Wenhui urged them to stay, insisting the family would be treated well as the party’s friend.
Instead, the family’s property was seized and its members attacked in a series of political campaigns. In 1958, local officials eager to demonstrate their fervor for Maoist class struggle presented Liu Wencai as the prototype of the exploiting landlord. His coffin was dug up, and his remains were scattered.
In 1959, the landlord’s residence was turned into a museum, featuring a “water dungeon,” an underground space half-filled with water. A woman who claimed to be the dungeon’s sole survivor described it as filled with human bones.
By the early 1960s, Liu Wencai was nationally notorious as the “chief representative of the landlord class for 3,000 years.” His brother Liu Wenhui, who in 1959 became forestry minister and escaped persecution under Zhou Enlai’s protection, was powerless to reverse the propaganda campaign, though he was secretly upset.
“What the hell are they talking about?” was his private comment on one newspaper article about Liu Wencai, according to his grandson Liu Shizhao.
Liu Wenhui, the younger brother of Liu Wencai and a Nationalist warlord in Sichuan Province who later allied with the Communists. CreditLiu Xiaofei
In 1965, the Sichuan authorities commissioned more than 100 life-size clay sculptures that the museum installed as the Rent Collection Courtyard, which purported to show how Liu Wencai and his lackeys bullied peasants to extract rents.
Replicas of the statues were exhibited in Beijing later that year, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors. In 1966, just before the onset of the Cultural Revolution, a documentary about Liu Wencai was released, and stories of his crimes were subsequently included in textbooks.
Denunciations of the landlord and the evil he ostensibly personified surged during the Cultural Revolution. Family members came under attack. A cousin of Mr. Liu who fled to Xinjiang was murdered along with his wife and children, as were many other people in China branded as “landlords.”
The frenzy subsided only in the 1980s, when liberal voices were tolerated to some extent. In 1988, the provincial authorities admitted that the water dungeon was an invention, and it was drained. But these beginnings of a re-evaluation stalled after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown as the party tightened its grip, Mr. Liu said.
In the museum, Mr. Liu pointed out items he said never belonged to his family.
A visitor asked, “This is your family?”
“I’m Liu Wencai’s grandson,” Mr. Liu said.
“Can we take a picture with you?” the man shouted excitedly, pointing at his friends.
Mr. Liu became the group’s tour guide, and the man, a railway official from Guizhou who said he had visited the museum on a school tour in the 1970s, was startled when Mr. Liu said that nearly everything on display was fake.
Xiao Shu, the pen name of Chen Min, who in 1999 published “The Truth About Liu Wencai,” a book that was soon banned, said the party would be reluctant to restore to respectability a villain of its own making.
His book was accused of “negating the legitimacy of the new democratic revolution,” when the party persecuted landlords and distributed their property to poor peasants, he said. “This is the basis of the regime’s legitimacy, so they don’t dare face the truth.”
Wu Hongyuan, 60, a retired county propaganda official who served as the museum’s director in the 1990s, said the process of restoring the truth could not be rushed. “The museum is too sensitive, and Liu Wencai is too famous,” he said.
Mr. Wu said he tried to recast the museum to more accurately present Liu Wencai’s life, but anytime he altered something, he said, former underground Communists in Anren would protest to the authorities.
Li Weijia, 98, was one of those protesters.
“He never protected party members!” insisted Mr. Li, in a hospital ward reserved for senior officials in Chengdu. “That’s confusing black and white!”
At the end of his trip to Anren, Mr. Liu visited Chen Fahong, 86, a former worker in Liu Wencai’s manor.
“We had rice and meat to eat then. He was kind,” Mr. Chen said of Liu Wencai in his modest yard amid onion fields. “After liberation” in 1949, he said, “we had only bran and grass to eat.”
Mr. Liu said that, looking back, the family regretted having trusted the Communists.
He recalled a song sung in his family after Liu Wenhui sided with the Communists, envisioning a paradise under the party’s rule.
“There is a good place beyond the mountains,” it goes. “There, rich and poor are equal.”