Professor Michael Szonyi doesn’t mind that his students sometimes feel uncomfortable in his undergraduate class on rural China. In fact, when it comes to learning about the land reform movement in the early years following the Communist Party’s victory in 1949, when hundreds of thousands of landlords were executed and land was redistributed to the poorest, that’s exactly the point. To get a firsthand taste of the movement that, as Professor Szonyi says, “overturned the existing economic and political order,” his students engage in a role-playing game, taking on characters of the residents of a village and members of the Communist Party work team sent down to implement land reform. From there, they have to “struggle” (斗争) out how each individual will be labeled—from the lucky ones who are named poor peasants to the unlucky who are declared to be landlords.
The course challenges students, who have been trained to be mutually respectful, to fight against each other, as they each try to avoid the landlord label. “If everyone is respectful in the meeting to decide class ranks, the meeting has failed,” Professor Szonyi says. He ends the session with a debriefing to ensure that class harmony is restored and everyone is back on an even keel, a luxury that was not afforded to Chinese peasants. In the course, which starts in the early twentieth century and goes up to today, he tries to capture the lives of China’s peasants, for whom the usual markers of modern Chinese history aren’t necessarily the most important moments. In the villages, for example, land reform mattered more than Chairman Mao declaring victory in Tiananmen Square in 1949, just as the great famine from 1959-61 was the most important event to hit the countryside, with far greater impact than, say, the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957, which destroyed the lives of many urban intellectuals. “Nobody has suffered more from the last 100 years of Chinese history than Chinese rural people,” says Professor Szonyi. “And there’s nobody whose contribution to the making of modern China is less well recognized or more misunderstood than rural people.”
Professor Szonyi, who is the Frank Wen-Hsiung Wu Professor of Chinese History, served as Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies from 2016-2022. He has written, translated or edited eleven books, including The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China (2017) and Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line (2008). He is also co-editor, with Jennifer Rudolph, of The China Questions: Critical Insights on a Rising Power (2018), and, with Jennifer Rudolph and Adele Carrai, of The China Questions 2: Critical Insights into US-China Relations (2022). He is currently writing a modern history of village China.