Wan Li, Who Helped China’s Farmers Emerge From Mao Era, Dies at 98
By CHRIS BUCKLEY

HONG KONG — Wan Li, the Communist Party leader who helped end the failed Mao-era policy of collective farming, which had left rural Chinese in desperate poverty and led to millions of deaths from starvation, died on Wednesday in Beijing. He was 98.

His death was reported by the Chinese state-run media.

Mr. Wan was the last survivor of the senior revolutionary veterans who pushed through China’s reforms under Deng Xiaoping beginning in the late 1970s, shaking off the socialist collectivism that Mao Zedong had imposed through communes, state control and top-down planning. The party’s obituary called Mr. Wan a “pioneer of China’s rural reforms.”

“Wan Li deserves every credit he gets for pushing the process forward,” said Frederick C. Teiwes, an emeritus professor of Chinese politics at the University of Sydney and co-author of a forthcoming history of the rural reforms. “He was willing to accept and push and support moves that would increase production and living conditions in the countryside, upon occasion taking risks.”

Mr. Wan said that the misery in villages in the years after Mao’s death had shaken his devotion to the revolution. He was appointed party secretary of Anhui Province, a rural part of eastern China, in 1977 and spent months visiting the countryside, where millions had starved to death in the early 1960s after Mao’s calamitous Great Leap Forward.

In one hut, historians and former aides have recounted, Mr. Wan found an old man and two teenage girls hiding under straw: they had only threads of clothing. In another, he found three naked children crammed inside a stove, seeking the residual heat. An emaciated farmer who had fought for the revolution told Mr. Wan that his innards had seized up from eating tree leaves.

“We’ve had so many years of development since liberation, but the ordinary people in this old revolutionary area still don’t have enough clothes to eat or food to fill their stomachs,” he said, according to an account of his visit to Jinzhai County in Anhui. “How can we show our faces to these simple country folk? This is shameful.”

Mr. Wan was born in rural Shandong Province in eastern China in December 1916. He plunged into revolutionary politics while studying at a teachers college, and joined the Communist Party in 1936. But as a rising official after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, he focused on urban construction.

“He was terribly shocked by what he saw” in rural areas, said Ding Xueliang, a professor of Chinese politics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who grew up in rural Anhui and saw the changes under Mr. Wan. “He didn’t have much experience in the countryside after 1949, so he wasn’t prepared for how bad it was.”

When drought blighted the countryside in 1978, Mr. Wan quietly began to encourage farmers in isolated parts of Anhui to slip from the strictures of Maoist communes. Bucking collective control, the farmers divided up tools, tasks and land among small groups and families, setting aside a share of the crops to feed themselves and sell in markets. Word spread, as did controversy.

“When the bumper harvest came in, it was even harder to keep it a secret,” said Yan Junchang, a farmer in one of the areas that furtively assigned farming to families.

Household contract farming, as it came to be called, was anathema to the precepts of Mao, and Mr. Wan ducked and wove politically to keep the policies alive. Even reform-minded officials were skeptical, and newspapers denounced the idea. But over time Mr. Wan and others became convinced that it was time to break with the past. A crucial ally was Zhao Ziyang, the future premier and party general secretary.

“What what was condemned before is not necessarily wrong,” Mr. Wan told officials. “What was promoted before is not necessarily right.”

Villagers and party leaders became convinced that family farming would increase harvests and reduce the financial burdens on the government. By 1982, it was established national policy. Rural land remained under collective ownership, leased out to farmers, but the communes were dead, and small factories mushroomed in more prosperous parts of the countryside.

Mr. Wan was promoted to the party’s central leadership and made vice premier in 1980, and he remained a prominent proponent of economic liberalization. In 1988, he was appointed chairman of the National People’s Congress, the country’s party-run legislature. But in Beijing, he never showed the same audacity that he displayed in Anhui.

In 1989, liberals hoped that Mr. Wan would return to his bolder past and defuse Deng’s confrontation with student protesters occupying Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Mr. Wan was traveling in North America, and dozens of members of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee urged him to return and convene the Standing Committee to block the hard-liners.

But Mr. Wan flew back to Shanghai and a statement was issued in his name endorsing martial law, days before the armed suppression of the protests began on June 3, 1989. Mr. Wan was apparently kept in Shanghai to avoid political trouble, though he had bowed to Deng’s demands, said Warren Sun, a historian of the Chinese Communist Party at Monash University in Australia and co-author with Professor Teiwes of the history of rural reforms.

“There seemed little question about where Wan Li’s sympathies lay,” Mr. Sun said, “but politics is another thing.”

Mr. Wan retired in 1993 and stayed out of politics, devoting his time to his hobbies: golf, bridge and tennis. His tennis partners included Vice President George Bush.

Mr. Wan’s wife, Bian Tao, died in 2003. They had four sons and a daughter, but official news reports did not make clear whether they all survive him.

鄧小平左右手萬里99歲病逝

曾是鄧小平左右手的中共前人大委員長萬里昨天過世，享壽九十九歲。萬里曾堅決支持包產到戶，是中共初期改革開放的支持者，但後來在「八九」鎮壓事件中站在鄧小平一方，且支持長江三峽大壩興建。

澎湃新聞網報導，1916年出生山東東平的萬里，昨天中午十二點因病去世。

萬里是鄧小平的「四大金剛」之一。1977年任安徽省委書記，力排眾議支持小崗村，率先推行家庭聯產承包責任制。農業部副部長批評包產到戶，萬里怒斥，「看你長得肥頭大耳，農民卻餓得皮包骨，你怎麼能不讓這些農民想辦法吃飽飯呢？ 」民謠稱「要吃米，找萬里」。

萬里在1949年，隨劉鄧大軍南下，迅速有效地組織籌備了大量軍需，得到了鄧小平賞識。萬里一生都將鄧小平當作親密戰友。文革後期，鄧小平復出，萬里受命出任鐵道部部長。大陸民間有「安全正點萬里行」之說，既指火車萬里行，也指萬里這個人「行」。

1976年，「四人幫」掀起批鄧、反擊右傾翻案風，時任鐵道部長的萬里，作為與科學院的胡耀邦、教育部的周榮鑫、國防科工委的張愛萍並稱的改革派「四大金剛」，再度被打倒。「四人幫」倒台後，萬里才被解放出來。文革結束，萬里當安徽省委書記，對安徽的窮大吃一驚。他去山區看望農民，但百姓不出來見他，因為沒褲子穿，家裡孩子藏在地鍋裡頭取暖，春節農民吃不了餃子。萬里越看越聽越問心情越沉重，越認定非另找出路不可。

1989年，天安門事件爆發，萬里曾被視為同情民運，但最後仍支持鄧小平的決定；1992年，任中共全國人大委員長任內，通過備受爭議的三峽大壩工程。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/world/asia/wan-li-who-helped-chinas-farmers-emerge-from-mao-era-dies-at-98.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/china/20150717/c17wan/zh-hant/

2015-07-16．聯合報．A12．兩岸．特派記者賴錦宏