Summary Of The Dragon's Village

The Dragon’s Village is an autobiographical novel of Yuan-Tsung Chen’s role in the land reform of revolutionary China in which property was extracted from the landlords and redistributed amongst the peasants. This exposure to the end product of her political beliefs forces her to reject the romantic notions she had previously attributed to the communist movement and to the life of peasants. This awakening does not, however, cause her to reject the land reform movement in itself, but is better characterized as a disillusioning. While raising moral disagreements with the violent means by which the reform was enacted, the author maintains an emotional connection and respect for the peasants (albeit without rose-tinted glasses) and for their …show more content…
Chen attempts to rationalize Chen’s mentality that this is “legal” in a revolution as she stares at the chaos-encapsulated lady Bai. This scene depicts Chen’s loss of innocence. Formerly, the notions of equality amongst the classes were poetically depicted by her uncle or heroically by Ma Li. Landownership, however, more closely resembles a zero-sum game in which the peasants’ gains are the landlords’ losses. To enact the idealist views of uplifting the peasantry, she must forcibly take from the landlords—who in some cases are simply rich peasants. This exposes Chen to the darker underbelly of the revolution; but does not, however, indicate her loss of faith in the movement. True, Chen’s role in taking from the landlords tarnishes her idealist notions of the revolution and obfuscates her view of what is the moral high ground. Had Chen somehow removed herself from the villages or from the administration, her rebuking of the movement could be more reasonably argued. Chen, rather, becomes more intertwined with the reform—not with the administration, but rather with the villagers