Gail HERSHATTER (University of California, Santa Cruz)

By 1951, XM had been a CCP member for thirteen years—eight years underground in southwest China during the war, and five years in the United States. He had hidden a Party transceiver under his bed in his father's Guilin house, sold a stash of smuggled goods to finance travel out of the Guomindang area for left-leaning intellectuals, attended graduate school in Massachusetts, listened to Tommy Dorsey and eaten pastrami in New York, written for the Overseas Chinese Daily, convinced patriotic Chinese students in the U.S. to return home to build a new China, and gone to work at the Foreign Ministry. Until 1951, however, he had not lived in the Chinese countryside. This paper explores the lessons he learned when he was assigned to assist with land reform in Sichuan.