Yao Yang, "Before My Grandfather's Portrait"

Yao Yang, “Before my Grandfather’s Portrait”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
　　
Yao Yang (b. 1964) is a well known economist at Peking University, Director of the China Center for Economic Research and the Dean of the National School of Development.  In the context of my Reading the China Dream project, I first became interested in Yao because of his engagement with Confucianism and his argument that reembracing Confucianism would be the best way for China to “sinicize Marxism” (see here and here).    

When the organizers of the project “The Exterior of Philosophy—On the Practice of New Confucianism” kindly invited me to present a paper at a conference they are holding in Switzerland in late August, 2022, I decided to focus on Yao and his “Confucian pragmatism.”  I find it intriguing that a senior professor at a prestigious university in China would “change course” in a way that, at least at first glance, appears to be bold and even radical.  Consequently, I have been reading a lot of Yao Yang for the past few weeks, which means that, for better or worse, I will be sharing my Yao Yang translations with you for the month of August.
​
Most of Yao’s dozens—if not hundreds—of books and articles focus on economic topics, and I rarely read academic work in economics in English, to say nothing of Chinese.  Luckily for me, throughout his career, Yao has produced both technical, granular studies of whatever he was interested in at the time, as well as “big picture” essays where he conveys the results of his and others’ research in broader, more accessible terms, as a way of contributing to public debate and solving important problems. 

These big picture essays are often both interesting and enjoyable, and a worthwhile research project might be to look at Yao’s writings as a public intellectual over time; the arc of his concerns might shed considerable light on the interaction between formal economic research and public policy debate between the late 1990s, when Yao began his academic career, and today. Ultimately, I think that Yao’s advocacy of Confucianism is a problem-solving exercise as well, and thus perhaps not quite as bold or radical a move as I initially thought, but I will have more to say about this when I update the blog in mid-August with more of Yao’s writings about Confucianism and liberalism.

​In the course of my recent research, I also discovered four essays by Yao that treat neither economics nor Confucianism, but instead are quite personal statements based on his experiences in his father’s home village in Jiangxi.  I translated all four, and include them in this update.  In addition to this one, the other three are “Three Days Back in the Village,” “The Vanishing Town,” and “My View of Revolutionary History.”

Yao was born in Xi’an, but spent most of the first eight years of his life in the small, single-surname village of Hujiangbei, where he was raised by his uncle and aunt.  The emotional ties forged by this experience led Yao to return when he could, even as an adult, and his visits prompted the reflections that led to these essays, three of which appear to have been written in the 2000s, and one in 2019, a further reflection based on the three texts already composed.   All four essays are well-written and interesting in their own right, not the least for their autobiographical nature, which, while not unheard of among public intellectuals in China (see here for one example) is not something I run across on a regular basis. 
 
In terms of the themes explored in these texts, two stand out.  One addresses the effects of reform and opening on village life after 25 or 30 years.  Yao applauds the material success that reform and opening have brought to many Chinese villages, but at the same time notes with sadness and frustration the diminishing sense of community and public spirit—even in single-surname villages like his, where kinship should help, but hardly seems to.  Villagers encroach on public land and goods to build homes that respect neither aesthetics nor tradition, and often leave old homes to decay (in part as a de facto claim on the land, should they ever need to build another house).  They build pigsties in ways that pollute public space, and village “authorities” are incapable either of penalizing those responsible or mobilizing the village to dig sewers to solve the problem.  Part of the problem is that village elites were largely eliminated during the Cultural Revolution, and village government largely abandoned during reform and opening.  It is surely significant that Yao Yang says not a word about village elections. 
 
The other theme is Yao’s reflection on the meaning of China’s revolution, the focus of the text translated here.  Yao’s grandfather was a revolutionary martyr, having joined the Chinese Communist Party (as well as the Kuomintang) in the 1920s, to be executed by the Kuomintang after participating in the Nanchang Uprising in 1927.  His grandfather’s portrait still hands in the family home where Yao grew up, which prompts Yao to wonder about what his grandfather would have thought about the twists and turns of China’s long revolutionary journey, and what the revolution has ultimately come to mean in his village.  What struck me was less Yao’s conclusion—“the revolution was indeed necessary, but now it is time to move on”—and more his willingness to think out loud about the revolution, something I find to be surprisingly rare in the writings of most Chinese public intellectuals.

Translation

A photograph of my grandfather hangs in the hall of my family’s old house in my home village. The frame is large and square, while the picture is oblong, and shows my grandfather from the chest up. His appearance is typical of the men in my family, thin, with an oval face, a high nose, and uncreased eyelids.  He died in 1927, at which time he was 21 years old. The photograph was probably taken shortly before his death. At 21, he wore his hair short and parted in the middle, as was popular at the time, and was dressed in a presentable Sun Yat-sen jacket.  His expression shows a reserve, a maturity, a serenity that belie his age.
 
My grandfather was the third of three brothers and the only one to receive a modern education. This is how his life is described in the 1990 edition of the local gazetteer of Xin’gan County:
 
“Yao Youguang 姚有光 (1906-1927), male, was born on October 24, 1906 in Hujiangbei village, Yijiang township. His father, Yao Zhefu 姚哲夫, was a Qing dynasty scholar who spent his life as a ‘poor teacher’ in a rural elementary school…In July of 1924, Yao Youguang attended a summer course organized by Zou Nu 邹努, a member of the Chinese Communist Party in the Xin’gan county town, where he read revolutionary books and journals such as ‘New Youth,’ ‘Guide 向导,’ and ‘Red Light 红灯.’ In August of that year, he joined the Communist Youth League.
 
In March of 1926, Yao Youguang joined the Chinese Communist Party, becoming a member of the Xin’gan County branch; in May, he became the head of the youth section of the Xin’gan County Peasant Association. 
 
In January of 1927, Yao Youguang was elected to the executive committee of Xin’gan county branch of the Kuomintang, and was transferred to the peasant movement seminar of the Provincial Peasant Association for further studies.  Later, he served as the special commissioner to the peasant movement in the three counties of Xinjian, Xin’gan and Xiajiang, and personally led the peasant mass movement many times, helping to establish the peasant revolutionary armies known as the Peasant Self Defense Army in the three counties. 
 
After the Shanghai massacre on April 11, 1927, Yao Youguang received the order to transfer to the Provincial Peasant Association.  For reasons of safety, he made his way from Renhe market in Xiajiang to Nanchang on a raft, cleverly hidden in a bag of peppers, thus evading the efforts by the Xin’gan Kuomintang  to arrest him and successfully completing his transfer. 
 
On August 1 of that same year, Yao Youguang participated in the Nanchang Uprising, known the world over, and subsequently obeyed the organization's order to stay in Nanchang to carry out underground revolutionary activities. In early November, Yao Youguang was unfortunately arrested by the right wing Kuomintang, and was shot dead in secret at dawn on November 21. The next day, the Lingnanbao published the news that Yao Youguang, a leader of the land revolution in Jiangxi, and seven others were executed by firing squad. Before his execution, Yao Youguang vehemently shouted: ‘I will die for communism, but millions of communists will appear after my death!’” 
 
While my grandfather was fighting against local tyrants and dividing the land among the farmers, my family back in the village heard about it and became very worried. My great-grandfather had been appointed magistrate of Qingjiang County (now Zhangshu City) by the national government, but died before taking up his post. Although my family was no longer wealthy by the time my grandfather and his brothers were young men, they still could not understand grandfather's "rebellion," so they sent his next older brother to walk the 30 li to the county town to warn my grandfather that "rebellion means death," which unfortunately turned out to be true. 
 
After my grandfather was killed in Nanchang, his brothers suffered as well. When the revolution failed, militias[2] were organized back home to take revenge, and his two brothers had to go into hiding in the mountains for three years. Grandfather's wife took their one-year-old son and went into hiding, and the child died as they were trying to escape. In order that my grandfather's family line not be extinguished, the larger family decided to have my grandmother raise the oldest brother’s third son, who became my father.  
 
In early 1983, I saw for the first time the long list of names of the martyrs from Jiangxi in the Memorial Hall of the Martyrs of the Revolution in Nanchang, and tried to imagine the faces of those martyrs for whom only their names remain—and sometimes not even that—and to say that I was “moved” is an understatement.  My grandfather was one of the lucky ones, and the same photograph of him hangs in the memorial hall. I stood in front of his portrait for a long time, not wanting to leave.

Although the same picture had always been in the hallway back in the house in the village, I had never taken much interest in him because, first, I was just a kid, and my family did not talk about him too much either, aside from offering sacrifices before his picture at New Years. It was only in 1983, when I was about the same age as my grandfather when he died, that I really began to think about him and try to understand the meaning of his short life. Now that I am more than twice my grandfather's age when he died, I still ponder the meaning of his young life. Was his sacrifice worth it? Did what he was seeking come to pass? How would he feel if he saw today’s China? Is this the China he would have wanted?
 
It’s true, after 22 years of extremely difficult struggle, his comrades-in-arms defeated their enemies at home and abroad and established their ideal, a people's republic, and he would be happy about that. It’s true, the farmers got their land, and the local tyrants and evil gentry are no more, and he would be happy about that.  It’s true, China is no longer invaded by foreign troops, and is much more respected in the world, and he would be happy about that.  It’s true, people's living standards have improved dramatically, and no one is having trouble getting enough to eat, and he would be happy about that…But still, many things have occurred over the past 60 years that he would have a hard time understanding.  
 
Mao Zedong's "On New Democracy," which he wrote in the early 1940s, defined the nature of the Communist-led revolution as a “new democracy” and imagined that this policy would remain in place for some time after the victory of the revolution. Thereupon we saw land reform, in which the farmers received land, realizing Sun Yat-sen's ideal of "land to the tiller." In the cities, except for the nationalization of monopoly capital, most of the private industries and businesses were left untouched and were allowed to continue to function.

However, the course of history did not follow Mao's original vision, and socialist transformation came quickly.  Private industry and commerce were either bought out or put into public-private partnerships; the farmers had to give up their newly acquired land and join people's communes. Although ideologically defined as the path to communism, in reality the communes were one of the means adopted by the state to control the farmers. In order to quickly achieve the goal of industrialization, the state had to seize the agricultural surplus in order to accelerate the accumulation of capital. However, the organizational costs of seizing the surplus were high in an economy dominated by decentralized small farmers, and the economic managers of the time were not experienced in using and managing markets, so they opted for the communes.

If the communes had been better organized, we would not have seen the disasters that occurred between 1959 and 1962; instead, the hysteria of the Great Leap Forward caused irreparable damage to the country and the people. The unprecedented famine became an scar on the history of the People's Republic that will not heal. However, the destruction of the Great Leap Forward, though painful, was temporary. In contrast, the devastation caused by the Cultural Revolution cannot be recovered in one generation.
 
If my grandfather had lived through the period of history between 1956 and 1976, I believe he would have shared much of the incomprehension of most of his comrades. But I also believe that he would have done what most of his comrades did, as long as he did not perish during the persecution of the Cultural Revolution—he would have given the Party another chance. In contrast, he would probably prefer not to see China as it is today. Yes, the people's standard of living has greatly improved, and almost every house in our small village has a TV set, or a landline in the house, or cell phones. However, there are some things that do not fit with his ideals.

Although the peasants are richer than they used to be, their social life is in chaos. No one takes care of public business, and the formerly harmonious village architecture has been disrupted by a chaotic mixture of houses. Young people have gone off in droves to Guangdong and Zhejiang to work, but what they bring back is a sense of disappointment and helplessness. The gap between urban and rural areas has widened greatly in the past thirty years and will not narrow in the foreseeable future. In addition, some party cadres are corrupt and the power in their hands is not used to serve the people, but to fill their own pockets.  All of this is a betrayal of grandfather's ideals.
 
Perhaps what would be most incomprehensible to Grandfather is that China seems to have gone full circle over the past 60 years: the revolution to which he devoted himself was originally intended to create an egalitarian society based on public ownership, but China today, in terms of its economic and social system, seems to have returned to 1956, or even to pre-revolutionary times. Surely it is not that the revolution wasn’t necessary?  I ask this question both for my grandfather and for myself.  After several years of reflection, my answer is that "the revolution was indeed necessary." 
 
The starting point for understanding my answer is to put the Chinese revolution in the context of modern world history. The history of the past three or four hundred years is the history of mankind's emergence from traditional society and evolution toward modern society. In traditional societies, dictatorship was the norm, and what controlled people's behavior was often not reason, but prejudices and superstition; by contrast, modern societies are marked by freedom, democracy, and reason. The two are opposed to each other. In the transition from traditional to modern societies, revolutions have occurred in almost all of the countries in which the transition originated: in England, in France, in Japan, Russia, and Spain. Revolutions were necessary because traditional societies created interest groups that benefited from them and did not want to lose their past privileges. 
 
Looking at China from a world perspective, it is necessary to understand our history since 1840 as a whole. Before that, China lived in a world of tianxia, not a world of nations.[3] China's national identity was forged in the process of resisting imperialist invasion. The political ideas behind the 1911 Revolution, the May Fourth Movement, and the New Democratic Revolution were all very different, but their starting point was anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism. Although the century following 1840 was full of slaughter, China nonetheless completed the construction of a nation-state and the transformation from a traditional to a modern society.

From a larger historical perspective, such a transformation takes at least a century; the ideological battles involved are less important than the great transformation. If we carefully compare the mainland and Taiwan in the 1950s, we might be surprised to find that the two places were very similar in every way except for the differences in the ruling parties. Both places carried out a thorough land reform; both places emphasized the importance of developing heavy industry; both places engaged in state-run enterprises, while both allowed the development of private industry and commerce; both places took advantage of the price gap between industrial and agricultural products to extract surplus from agriculture, and so on.

There may be many reasons for this, and there are many differences between the two places, but what the two share is that both the Communist Party and the Kuomintang recognized the importance of social equality for social development and economic construction. Moreover, it is also precisely because both places created an equal society that both governments were free to pursue economic growth; in particular, land reform gave the peasants rights in land and increased their motivation to produce, so that the government could take the surplus from the peasants without provoking their resistance.
 
In terms of egalitarianism, our history between 1956, when the socialist transformation occurrred, and 1978, when reform and opening began, was not without significance.  True enough, the suffering of the Chinese people during those twenty some-odd years greatly exceeded their happiness, and the thirty years since the reform and opening seem to have gone full circle, bringing China back to the pre-1956 period; but in those twenty years we made remarkable achievements in strengthening social equality, empowering the people, and building their civic consciousness. In terms of equality, the commune system and the public ownership system in the cities almost completely deprived the population of the right to accumulate personal and family wealth, thus producing an extreme equality in income distribution.

This egalitarianism had a tremendously negative effect on the economic development of the time, but it also served to level Chinese society completely. In addition, the massive participation of women in employment greatly enhanced the status of women in the family and in society. In terms of empowering the population, the government vigorously advocated literacy campaigns, universal basic education, and universal basic medical care, which allowed China to be better equipped in terms of human resources by the beginning of reform and opening. When comparing the economic development of China and India, the Indian economist Amartya Sen (b. 1933), a Nobel laureate in economics, has repeatedly emphasized China's advantage in human resources as the main reason for China's faster growth. In terms of building civic consciousness, various organizational efforts have launched the process of transforming the population from natural people to political people. This process is not yet complete, but it is an essential part of the construction of the Chinese state.

The world of nation-states differs from tianxia in that from the tianxia perspective, a person or a small group can exist apart from others, whereas in the world of nation-states everyone is a member of the state as a community. Therefore, the world of tianxia is made up of natural people , while in the world of nation-states people must become political people, i.e. citizens, which is the process that human beings must go through in their transformation from traditional society to modern society. In this way, we can understand Liang Shuming's 解梁漱 (1893-1988) comments toward the end of his life in Has Man a Future? in which he criticizes himself for challenging Mao Zedong shortly after the revolution.[4] Liang and his contemporaries in the rural construction movement during China’s Republican period had taken an approach that did not conform to the movement of history. What history needed was not for the farmers to return to tradition, but instead to be involved in the process of nation-building, becoming part of modern society. Today, the task we face in the countryside remains the same, and rebuilding the countryside around village democracy is the best option.
 
The egalitarian social structure and the increased capacity of the population provided the basis for the high economic growth of the People's Republic in the last thirty years. The contribution of the people’s increased capacity to economic growth is easy to understand, so I will focus here on the relationship between an egalitarian social structure and high economic growth. An egalitarian social structure means that there were no powerful interest groups in China, which meant that government economic policy could focus on the country's long-term economic development rather than on the short-term interests of certain groups of people.

We can do a thought experiment where we imagine that we are the ruler of a country, forced to make choices in either an egalitarian society or in an inegalitarian society.  In an egalitarian society, no social group is powerful enough to challenge our rule, and no social group is wealthy enough to bribe us, so our rational choice would be to not pander to the interests of or ally with any particular group. I call such a government a “neutral government.” Because of its neutral posture, such a government is free to adopt policies that encourage economic growth, even if those policies hurt some groups. In contrast, in an unequal society where some groups are strong enough to overthrow we or rich enough to buy us off, our rational choice is to be a biased government that looks after the interests of powerful groups more than the overall economic development of the society. Because of the absence powerful interest groups in Chinese society, the Chinese government has become a neutral government in the past thirty years.

Looking back at this history, we can see that the government's economic policies have been selective—special economic zones, opening up to the outside world, enterprise reforms, joining the World Trade Organization, etc.,— all of these were initiatives that were conducive to long-term economic growth but hurt the interests of some people. However, government policies have not favored the interests of particular groups of people over time, nor have they hurt the interests of particular groups of people over time; in the long run, even at the policy level, all groups of people have been treated fairly equally. 
 
For this reason, in my view, the last thirty years in China have not been a simple return to the pre-1956 period, but rather an upward spiral. I am not sure, however, that my grandfather would be entirely satisfied my answer. He might agree with my general assessment of the Chinese revolution, although he might still consider the ideological battle between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang important; perhaps he would agree with my assessment of the first thirty years of the People's Republic, although he might still consider socialist transformation necessary. But he would surely persist in asking: "Why is the gap between rich and poor now so much larger than before 1956? Why is the urban-rural divide becoming wider?"

​As an economist, I can certainly blame the market for this. Indeed, the market naturally widens the gap between rich and poor. But I know this doesn't answer my grandfather's question. As a socialist country, we could do better. I still have not completely thought this question through, but what I can tell my grandfather with certainty is that, since I first stared at his picture 26 years ago and began to think seriously about the meaning his short life and that of my coming life as an adult, I have arrived at some answers about the Chinese revolution and the successes and failures of contemporary China.
 
Sixty years ago, in his inscription for the Monument to the People's Heroes, Mao Zedong wrote: " Eternal glory to the heroes of the people who laid down their lives in the people's war of liberation and the people's revolution in the past three years!  Eternal glory to the heroes of the people who laid down their lives in the people's war of liberation and the people's revolution in the past thirty years!  Eternal glory to the heroes of the people who from 1840 laid down their lives in the many struggles against domestic and foreign enemies and for national independence and the freedom and well-being of the people!" The Monument to the People's Heroes will be immortalized for all time because of this inscription, and grandfather will be immortalized for having been one of the countless acknowledged and unknown people’s heroes who "struggled against domestic and foreign enemies and for national independence and the freedom and well-being of the people.”
 
One evening in early autumn, my wife and I were taking a walk in Houhai. We avoided the busy commercial sections, and followed the small lakeside paths to an area where there are compounds occupied by many households, which was quieter and closer to nature. Suddenly we heard the sound of a group singing with musical accompaniment not far way, and followed the sound to a pavilion where we saw a group of middle-aged and elderly men and women performing with abandon, surrounded by a crowd of spectators. When we got there, they were singing the patriotic song "The Red Blooms of the Wild Lillies 山丹丹开花红艳艳."[5] The singers were some ten women in their fifties and sixties, and the leader was a brightly dressed old lady who sang at the top of her lungs in a high and loud voice, with energy to spare; the accompanists were six or seven men of the same age, with all kinds of instruments, both Chinese and Western, and everyone was completely into it. Everyone—the singers, the musicians, the audience—was completely mesmerized, it was such a happy scene! I couldn't help but tear up. My grandfather would surely be gratified.
 
I would like to dedicate this article to the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China.
 
First draft completed on June 9, 2009, on a flight from Beijing to New York.
　　
Finalized at my home in Century City on June 25, 2009.
 
Notes

[1]姚洋, “在祖父的遗像前,” posted to the Aisixiang website on November 30, 2009. 

[2]Translator’s note:  The Chinese word for these militias is huixiangtuan/还乡团, although this generally refers to events that occurred in the countryside in the 1940s when groups took revenge on those thought to have collaborated with the Communists.

[3]Translator’s note:  Tianxia/天下, which literally means “all under heaven,” is best understood as China’s world view prior to the fateful arrival of the West in the 19th century.  From a tianxia perspective, China stood at the center of a moral universe, and the force of civilization diminished as one moved from the center toward the peripheries.  That said, even distant “barbarians” could become more “civilized” by engaging with and imitating China, in part through the rituals of the tribute system.   China did of course understand the rules of realpolitik and pursued her own “national” interests, but the idea of equal nation-states was not part of the tianxia perspective.

[4]Translator’s note:  Liang Shuming was a prominent philosopher and public intellectual in the Republic period, and was also involved in efforts to reconstruct rural Chinese society.  Liang famously clashed with Mao in 1953 over the general direction of the revolution, particularly in the countryside.

[5]Translator’s note:  This song was composed in 1971, and celebrates the arrival of the Red Army in the Yan’an region, the cradle of China’s revolution.  It is included in the corpus of “China’s one hundred most patriotic songs.”  You can view a performance on Youtube here.