Over its 75-year history, the People’s Republic of China has suffered numerous traumas, but perhaps none with longer-lasting consequences than land reform—a violent campaign of torture, murder, and mob rule that the Communist Party enacted in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The program’s stated intent was to redistribute property to landless farmers, but in reality it was used to bring huge swaths of Chinese society to heel through the brutal persecution of landowners.
This history is the governing party’s ultimate taboo, its unspoken original sin. Over the decades, independent historians and ordinary people in China have at times managed to publicly criticize some of the party’s actions—even major upheavals such as the Cultural Revolution—without facing reprisal. But land reform is so fundamental to how the current government took power that no citizen may portray it as anything other than a benevolent campaign that brought fairness and prosperity to China’s long-suffering farmers.
This context is what makes Fang Fang’s novel Soft Burial, recently translated into English by Michael Berry, so electrifying. Starting around the turn of the 21st century, independent historians began to explore land reform, drawing on oral histories to challenge the party’s narrative. But their works were either quickly banned or circulated only underground. Soft Burial, first published in China in 2016, was different. Fang is one of her country’s best-known novelists, and a longtime member of its literary establishment. After Soft Burial was published, it won a sought-after literary prize and was widely discussed in mainstream Chinese media, until backlash prompted censors to ban it.
Although many people have written China off as a completely closed, authoritarian country, it has a broad movement of independent writers, thinkers, and filmmakers—some on the fringes of society but some, like Fang, firmly part of the establishment. Her novel is one of the first works to gain a mainstream readership in China that uncovers the buried reality of land reform, the reasons the party pushed it so brutally, and the inherited pain it has visited upon Chinese people. The widespread, if short-lived, conversation surrounding the book shows that even a powerful authoritarian state can’t fully erase history.
Abroad, Fang is best known as the author of Wuhan Diary, an account of the city’s 2020 COVID lockdown, which initially controlled the virus’s spread but set the stage for years of arbitrary, harsh, and increasingly ineffective shutdowns across China. Berry had begun translating Soft Burial shortly after it was published in China but shifted to Wuhan Diary in 2020 because of its topicality. Now Soft Burial has been published alongside Berry’s translation of The Running Flame, one of Fang’s other novels, which tells the story of a woman on death row for killing her abusive husband.
Soft Burial’s title comes from the practice of interring someone without a coffin, which in traditional China would happen to the very poor, or after a war or disaster—the sort of catastrophe that befell rural China when land reform became a tool for social revolution and authoritarian control.
The novel begins in the present, centering on the story of an old widow in the Chinese city of Wuhan. As a very young woman, in 1952, she had been pulled unconscious out of a river, after nearly drowning. When she awoke, she had no memory. She evidenced some education—she could recognize storylines from a classic novel and some mythology—but China had been taken over by a Communist Party that was intent on violent struggle against elites. And so a kindly doctor advised her to hold on to her amnesia: Illiteracy and ignorance, he told her, were the best forms of protection.
After several years, the doctor was widowed, and he married the rescued woman. They had a son, who found success in China’s southern boomtowns, eventually returned to Wuhan, and bought an opulent villa for his family. But when he moves his mother in, the wealth and prosperity trigger something in the old woman—it all reminds her of something dangerous, something she can’t quite put her finger on. Exhausted and bewildered, she falls into a coma, and while unconscious, she travels through the 18 levels of hell, a concept found in many Chinese religious traditions—each revealing more of her past. We learn that the old woman was from a landowning family, and lost her first husband’s family, as well as her own parents and brother, to mass suicide and murder.
The novel’s other storyline revolves around her son, who discovers diaries revealing that his father, the doctor, was also born into a landowning family but had hidden his background. When the son travels to Sichuan province with an academic friend who intends to create an inventory of old villas, he discovers the house where his mother had lived with her first husband and in-laws, and begins to piece together his family’s repressed history.
Long before the Communists took power, reformers of all stripes had advocated land redistribution. In the mid-20th century, about 80 percent of Chinese lived in the countryside, and many lacked property. But in numerous cases, landholders were not exactly fat cats. Independent research has shown that in the eastern part of Sichuan province, where parts of Soft Burial take place, landholders owned on average just 2.4 acres, and many worked the fields alongside hired hands.
In the late 1940s, as the Communists gained the upper hand in China’s civil war, they began to aggressively pursue their goal of radically restructuring Chinese political, economic, and cultural life. The biggest obstacle standing in the party’s way was the landed gentry, or shi.
This mostly educated group had been the backbone of traditional China. They built schools and roads, managed temples, and raised militias to provide local security. Because the imperial bureaucracy wasn’t large and did not penetrate to small towns or villages, much of local life was run by this gentry. So if the party was going to succeed, this class had to be destroyed and replaced with a new bureaucratic caste of Communist officials.
After taking power in October 1949, the party stoked the flames of anger and hatred against landowners, resulting in the first mass campaign of violence in the People’s Republic. Historians estimate that at least 2 million people were killed, including entire families. Survivors were beaten, tortured, and sexually assaulted, and the former gentry and their descendants became a class of formal outcasts for the next 30 years—denied jobs, promotions, and higher education.
Over the following decades, rural China plunged into ever-greater crises. In the mid-’50s, the party expropriated the land it had given to the farmers, eventually leading to the Great Famine, which killed as many as 45 million people. Even today, farmers have land-use rights but do not own their land, which deprives them of capital and subjects them to party directives on how to use it. During the party’s push to urbanize China in the 2000s, many farmers had to surrender even these meager rights in exchange for an apartment and a welfare check.
As Fang unravels her characters’ stories, she also reveals the complexity of examining the past. In their own ways, both mother and son are reluctant excavators of these buried memories. The woman has almost completely repressed them, revisiting them only at the very end of her life. For the son, digging into his family’s history is a risky enterprise; he has made good in modern China and doesn’t want to rock the boat. When his friend encourages him to explore further, he hesitates. The safest choice, he thinks, is to forget the past and move on with life.
As a work of literature, the novel has its flaws. The stories are almost too perfectly synchronized, with every loose end tied up. Not only does the young man coincidentally travel to the same part of the country where his mother was born, but he finds the very villa where she once lived with her in-laws, and the secret tunnel she used to escape. At one point, part of this story is told to a character in the novel who exclaims, “It sounds like a television drama!”
Still, it is a riveting read, and an illuminating one; it shows how China’s independent thinkers often feed on one another’s work. Soft Burial echoes the work of Tan Song, a scholar who spent years researching land reform in Sichuan province. Other writers and artists have also begun to mine this era for clues to China’s current authoritarian malaise. At last year’s Berlin Film Festival, the independent filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai screened a movie on land reform that drew a direct line from those events to the impoverishment of rural life today.
Not surprisingly, the subject remains taboo. In 2021, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued a list of 10 “historically nihilist” rumors that must be banned—one of them, of course, was land reform. The government’s goal is to keep its people in a state of amnesia over the country’s history, but novels such as Soft Burial show that in China, the past will always get dug up.
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