¶ … Dragons Village
On first glance, it would seem that the poverty of rural China would be an ideal place for individuals to sow communist ideology. The individuals in question were oppressed by crushing poverty, and had been treated in an inequitable fashion by the city dwelling, educated and urban classes by decades. However, to Chen Yuan-tsung's autobiographical work historical fiction, The Dragon's Village, demonstrates that land reform was hardly welcomed with open arms by the Chinese peasantry. Rather than acceptance, the individuals who took to the fields and rice paddies of China to spread the doctrine of communism, found a peasantry largely hostile to the ideology they espoused. The reasons for this difficulty included the still present but invisible class tensions between the two groups in opposition. The educated children of the urban elite who had adopted communism as the slogans through which to proclaim their adolescent rebellion had a great deal finding a convincing political tone to open the ear of the hungry and undereducated Chinese peasantry. According to Maoist doctrine, the working class was superior because it was the revolutionary class in Marxist dogma. However, the urban revolutionary children of the well-educated city dwellers saw these peasants only from a romanticized distance until they actually became a part of the world of the peasants. Because the urban teenagers had little idea of the realities of life of the peasants, little dialogue and exchange of ideas was possible between the two social orders until the urban teenagers had made themselves a part of rural life. Even then, although class tensions did not exist in Marxism dogma, in the real world class and gender prejudices prevented a full, deep and meaningful dialogue between these two groups.
The heroine of The Dragon's Village is Guan Ling-ling, originally from Shanghai. Guan leaves home to get a job at the Central Film...
She wishes to help the poor of China, in contrast to her family. However, her idealism is soon quashed by reality. She thinks that her decision to take part in land reform in a remote mountain village will be met with open arms by the farm laborers, who view this female teenager with a strange accent with great disdain. What does she know about their lives? The reader is sympathetic to the peasants, at least initially.
Guan is not entirely unsympathetic, however, because her commitment seems to be genuine, even if only in her own eyes. She has chosen to remain in China after the Communists assume power in 1949, even though her family and fiancee have fled to capitalist Hong Kong.
Her adolescent rebellion has taken the form of political commitment, rather than rock n' roll or unusual clothing, as it does with so many American teenagers. Guan views herself as superior to her bourgeois family, as more patriotic and more dedicated to the egalitarian Marxist ideals of the true China, of the true revolution. Furthermore, one of the reasons the peasants reject Guan is not only her urban background and her greater literacy, but also the simple fact that she is a woman, and a young woman at that. The difficulty she has being female in the new society she has chosen only intensifies the book's theme of how both rural prejudges as well as Marxist dogma inhibit a constructive form of political change in China.
The book The Dragon's Village thus does not idealize the peasantry any more than it idealizes the fervor of Guan's blind and ill-informed commitment to land reform. Were it to do that it would be just as false as the rigid ideology Guan and her urban compatriots attempt to inculcate in the remote peasant village…
