If you ask your Chinese friend what Dou dizhu is, he will probably tell you it is a card game using 54 cards. He would be correct. However, Dou dizhu also refers to a bloody historical event that few players today think of when they play the card game.
Dou dizhu, or “斗地主” in Mandarin Chinese, literally means “fighting the landlord”. However, this is not the “I hate my landlord, so we had a brawl” type of fight. It refers to the mass persecution and killing of landowners in China between 1950 and 1953.
It was part of the Land reform movement. Don’t let the word “reform” fool you: the estimates of total casualties ranged from 0.2 million to 5 million from 1949 to 1953. Another 1.5 to 6 million people were sent to Laogai camps. For perspective, the estimated number of Jews killed during the Holocaust from 1941 to 1945 is approximately 6 million.
What was the Land reform movement? In one sentence, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) motivated peasants to forcibly take land from landowners, injuring, torturing, and killing many. It was a classicide, the deliberate and systemic destruction of a social class through persecution or violence. Atrocities were committed in creative ways, including pressuring landlord’s women into marrying their husbands’ persecutors.
The reader must be abhorred to learn that the name of a card game refers to the death of millions of people. You might also wonder why this game is so popular in China despite the name. The truth is the term Dou dizhu is so normalised that I never thought about the historical meaning until someone pointed that out to me less than a year ago.
Sadly, but not surprisingly, the CCP has never apologised for the mass murder of the landowners. Instead, you can find article after article on Baidu (the Chinese censored equivalent of Google) justifying the atrocities, arguing that it was necessary for the Maoist Marxist agenda.
Comentarios