More than forty years after its initial publication, Fanshen remains the essential volume for anyone fascinated by China’s revolutionary rural reform process. In the years since the Chinese Communist Party first came to power, tradition and modernity have had a complementary relationship

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I set foot in China on November 14th, 1976. In the years before China, I spent the summers in Austria, England, the U.S., Spain, Portugal, and the countries of Maghreb. In mid-summer 1976, when planning a short trip – I no longer know what it was – I bumped into someone I knew as a self-taught Chinese appassionato working for the local government. He possessed a piece of information that I, as an undergraduate, could only dream of. For the first time, based on the exchange program between China and Yugoslavia, the federal government assigned scholarships for China from the Republic of Slovenia, which, in 1976, was still part of socialist Yugoslavia. “Applications are still open,” the government person told me. It was a few weeks before Chairman Mao passed, and I felt I needed to be there. I needed to encounter the unknown; I might be witnessing something big, my brain chattered.

So, from the moment I learned about the possibility of traveling to China until I applied for the scholarship, was merely 48 hours. Was it less than a second of 5000 years of Chinese civilization?  When Mao died on September 9th, I wondered what would happen to my application. For my purpose, Mao died too early since China was a hermetically isolated country with no back channels to learn what kind of impact Mao’s death would have on my traveling to China. As I learned later, even the CIA was absent from China during the Cultural Revolution. They only came in 1979 after the two countries reestablished diplomatic relationships. Would they let me in? Considering that Yugoslavia was known as a socialist revisionist country and I never was a member of the Communist Party, I was asking myself. At the same time, China, in the immediate period after Mao’s death, was all twists and turns. Which way would China turn after the great helmsman passed away? I wanted to see Mao’s China before anything dramatic happened. But now, there was a risk: with Mao’s death, his experiment may go on, but this time, it would be without the support of “Mao Zedong thought,” whatever his thoughts were about.  At least, this was the prevailing mindset among the informed West. In my case, I searched for any China-related material in the Yugoslavia university libraries. Still, without organized and systematic Chinese studies in Yugoslavia, there was no significant material to study the history of China. There was no relevant material on contemporary China and no analysis of Mao’s model of People’s Communes, which were to be transformed and unplugged from the Western center of the capital economy. I only learned about Fan Sheng once I arrived in China since the British students almost knew it by heart. The book was first published in 1966 and reprinted in 2008, more than forty years after its initial publication. William Hinton’s Fanshen was a pioneering work, revealing a look into life in the Chinese countryside, where tradition and modernity have had a complimentary and caustic relationship since the Chinese Communist Party first came to power. It is a rare, concrete record of social struggle and transformation as witnessed by a participant. Would I have traveled to China if I had read Fanshen beforehand? Mao’s model was a kind of utopia that we thought was not wholly impossible. However, reading about Fanshen – a village transformation under Mao’s regime – would no doubt require a second thought. Yes, we were deprived of this kind of reading and thinking. At the same time, our friends and colleagues from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) read and reread the book as a script while still in London, so they understood better the picture we all watched during our endless visits to Chinese villages transformed into People’s communes.

Anyway, all eventual China study centers were distant and beyond my budget. I felt centuries away from where I sit now, writing this essay only five blocks from the Library of Columbia University in New York. Or, better yet, five seconds away from Google Search for what is needed.

But back in 1976, my search was minimal and consisted of collecting phone numbers and learning of the often unreliable names and sources. Did we know that Mao’s experimental, egalitarian model of society, called “The Great Leap Forward,” created the famine and death of millions of people? We did not! Did the top Yugoslav leadership know about it? Perhaps, but vengeful as they were, they giggled to China since they could afford to reward every student who would go to China with a scholarship equal to the salary of the top Chinese leaders! In a world of no global communication, with no TV or internet, few people had direct knowledge or experience of China. The existing ones spent a short time in China, enough to get seduced or brainwashed by the available ideologies or love for the remote and exotic ancient Chinese history of the Celestial Empire. To me, these rare reports were, most of the time, incomprehensible and incredible. With every new day, while devouring the little literature available (strangely enough, I found volumes of Science and Civilization in China in one of the libraries), my urge to go to Beijing increased.

Less than a month later, China experienced its first political convulsion in the post-Mao era. On October 6, Hua Guofeng, then minister of the intern, ordered the arrest of the “gang of four,” four leaders closely associated with the Cultural Revolution and with the egalitarian programs it produced. Among them and their leader was Jiang Qing, also known as Madame Mao, who was a Chinese communist revolutionary, actress, and major political figure during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).

She was the fourth wife of Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist Party and Paramount leader of China. She used the stage name Lan Ping ((蓝苹)during her acting career (which ended in 1938) and was known by many other names. Jiang was best known for playing a major role in the Cultural Revolution and for forming the radical political alliance known as the Gang of Four.

The arrest of the “Gang of Four”(四人帮)  was news too big to be ignored by any news organization outside of China. So, I remember a rainy day in October, parked in front of the Opera House in Ljubljana, where my governmental source and I were discussing what to do. What course will China take? If I go to China, it will be for at least two years. What shall I do? The language the “Gang of Four” members were writing in was similar to the language of Marx and Engels in their early “German Ideology”; it could be fun to discuss it on the spot. But what was my other real goal, which was to go to China? I knew only a little about China. Whether it was ancient, imperial, republican, or Maoist, none of these chapters was enough to make a story complete.

Later in October, I finally got the hint that approved scholarships were coming. I was visiting my mother, and we were watching the celebrations of the arrest of the “Gang of Four,” which coincided with the promotion of Hua Guofeng as the new leader of China. I was teasing my mother by saying I might be in Tiananmen Square in a few weeks. She did not believe me; she said it was one of my things. I let her think so, but I had no intention of explaining why and how. I remember I called her a few days before the departure to tell her that my thing was now the reality!

I had to pack in ten days. I left a suitcase of books behind that were part of my regular reading. I also packed a copy of Wilhelm Reich’s “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” as I thought it might be appropriate to read in China. I remember that mail took ages.

While waiting for my books to arrive, I had a vivid nightmare. I dreamed that Hua Guofeng called me into the Great Hall of the People, waving the Reich’s book in his hand. He briefly interrogated me and then because I read something forbidden in China, he cut off a finger on my right hand. Only a dream and yet so vivid that I still recall it all these years later.

I never had political dreams before, and I never even considered politics. China changed me. But would China change my rebellious spirit? In their dreams!