Naked Earth (1956)
Eileen Chang (1920-1995)
245 pages
A crushing claustrophobia envelopes a reader in the opening chapters of Eileen Chang’s powerful novel, Naked Earth, and continues tightening its dispiriting grip through to the end. Set in the People’s Republic of China of the early 1950’s, as the Communist revolutionaries have emerged victorious from the Chinese Civil War, Chang’s novel examines the effects on the Chinese people of the Communist Party’s aggressive consolidation of power. Her portrayal of the Chinese social and political milieu of that time most nearly resembles a nightmarish cross between Huxley’s 1984 and Kafka’s The Trail, as the Party creates a suffocating web of mutual surveillance and fear. Perhaps even more haunting than the disturbing image of her characters caught up in the intricate and ultimately dangerous machinations in the China of the 1950’s, is the recognition of the all-to-common human traits that allow such nightmares to erupt anywhere in the world given the right conditions; “man’s inhumanity to man”, to borrow from poet Robert Burns.
The story opens as a truck travels into the Chinese countryside carrying university students mobilized by the government to carry out land reform. Led by a low-level, Communist party organizer, the group has been assigned to help party members in a small farming village re-apportion land from Big Landlords (in the novel, formal government terms and slogans are capitalized) to the local Poor, who are mostly landless day-workers. The village the student team arrives at, however, has no Big Landlords, and so the local officials, afraid of failure, go after even the Middling Farmers, grabbing all the land around the village for re-distribution. To justify the taking of the land for the poor, the officials condemn and demonize even lower class working farmers as Big Feudal Exploiting Landlords, subjecting them to brutal ‘denunciation’ meetings, and then imprisoning or torturing them to death.
Among the students watching the increasingly zealous and overheated mob is the story’s protagonist, Liu Ch’üan, who has arrived in the village with a passionate desire to support the Communist Party’s efforts to improve conditions. Liu quickly becomes disillusioned as he observes the local party officials, with the support of the party organizer, whip the villagers into a frenzied and increasingly gruesome mistreatment of the working class villagers. Under consideration for party membership, Liu is looked on by the party organizer directing the group as an unofficial leader among the students, and so feels some level of responsibility to try and guide events. At the same time, he hesitates to raise his voice in opposition --- the very slogans and mottos that had seemed proper and principled in the fervor of the student meetings back on campus he now finds turned, in the crucible of policy implementation in the village, into an ideological minefield; a small miss-step potentially ending one’s hope for party membership or even putting one’s life at risk.
When Liu does finally speak out against the abuse of the lower class farmers, the organizer quickly chastises him, saying that Liu has “taken the wrong Class Route,” and is due for some Self-Examination” by the group. Even after the meeting, when Liu talks briefly to a fellow student who shares his concerns, danger lurks; another passing student warns them in a whisper to stop their discussion: “If anybody should hear, they’ll say we’re Holding a Small Meeting.” (40) Every action, every word, can be twisted into an accusation of working against the Party.
Liu survives the situation in the village, saved in part by a sudden government-ordered transfer, along with the party organizer, to Shanghai. In what is effectively a promotion for the two of them, they are assigned to the Resist-America Aid-Korea Association, formed to prepare propaganda in support of the Chinese efforts backing North Korea against the US-supported South Korean army. Whereas in the countryside Liu had dealt with a small group of rather transparently corrupt party officials, in the big city he finds himself buffeted by a vast network of shifting conflicts and alliances among party members seeking advancement and warding off political threats. He also discovers the unforeseeable risks of sudden shifts in government policies that can turn someone who may have been in favor just the day before into a pariah, accused of being a villainous traitor, becoming toxic to even accidental acquaintances. For a person of conscience, such as Liu, just staying out of trouble with the party, much less achieving advancement through its ranks, becomes a virtually untenable proposition.
Chang has written a compelling condemnation of the authoritarian government that formed in China in the wake of the Chinese civil war of the 1940’s, and the vast and oppressing system of psychological and social control it imposed to maintain power. Through the trials and tribulations of her affecting main character, Liu Ch’üan --- a conscientious common-man who is neither a self-centered party member focused only on advancement nor a self-sacrificing idealist --- Chang demonstrates the pernicious ability of such systems to undermine and eliminate even principled opposition.
Other reviews / information:
This another wonderful selection in the New York Review of Books (NYRB) Classics collection.
This NYRB Classics edition has an introduction by Perry Link (available on-line here), in which he mentions that United States Information Service (USIS) offered Chang a grant after she left China in 1952 to write this book, and another (The Rice-Sprout Song). He comments that:
This fact has been widely noted, and its significance sometimes exaggerated. It is far-fetched to imagine that the USIS distorted Chang’s writing. She is too powerful a writer for that --- too “immune from being tricked,” in [MaoTse-tung confederate] Tai Ch’ing’s phrase. (xii)
I have also read and reviewed (here) a set of short stories by Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City, another selection in the NYRB Classics collection.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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