A sculpture displayed at Yanhuang Art Museum in Beijing shows landlord Liu Wencai dragging a new mother, in an attempt to take the woman away and enslave her. Photo: CFP

Sporting a black satchel, leather sandals and a pair of thick glasses makes Liu Xiaofei look exactly like a tour guide.

However, he is more than that.

Liu, 65, spends most of his time working as a volunteer narrator in a museum converted from the former residence of Liu Wencai, an influential landlord in Sichuan who was portrayed as a villain during the land reform movement of the 1950s.

"I am Liu Wencai's grandson. The stories in the museum are so full of loopholes that you cannot get to know the true Liu Wencai. I have to restore the real life of my grandfather," said Liu Xiaofei.

Dating back to the 1950s, when the land reform campaign, aimed at forcefully taking land from landlords and redistributing it to farmers, swept across the country, China created evil stereotypes of the landlord class through sophisticated top-down propaganda techniques.

Notorious landlords, including Liu Wencai and Zhou Chunfu, a landlord from Liaoning Province, have become widely known as the epitome of evil during feudal society and were regarded as the target of the class struggle. Their supposed stories of exploitation of farmers have even been included in school textbooks.

During the class struggle campaign, they were castigated, bullied or killed, as well as their families. Decades later, the descendants of the accused landlords are standing up to challenge the bad reputations of their forebears, by interviewing former tenants, witnesses and victims of the campaign, trying hard to rehabilitate their predecessors that they believe have been wronged.

Liu Wencai came from a family of landowners and liquor merchants and became rich through the patronage of family members who held high-level positions in the government.

Allegedly under Liu's scheme, farmers were cheated in their leases and were forced to live in a state of permanent debt. Liu was also said to have been involved in organized crime, including opium smuggling.

His prominent family collapsed in the 1950s, when the "Down with the local tyrants and evil gentry" campaign swept China. The vigorous campaign, closely linked with China's nationwide land reform, soon escalated into a "class struggle" in which landlords were denounced by farmers.

Liu Xiaofei remembers that he and his parents were often asked to go to "struggle sessions" where people were organized to denounce reactionaries publicly. He was beaten heavily when he opposed the denouncement.

Liu Xiaofei's cousin and his family who couldn't bear the humiliation were murdered as they tried to escape to Xinjiang. The murderers have never been accounted for, according to the Southern People Weekly.

Thousands of kilometers away, another landlord's family in Dalian, Liaoning Province, also suffered.

Zhou Fuchun, who owned over 200 hectares of farmland in Dalian, was also identified as a landlord. His story became widely known after the soldier-writer Gao Yubao's semi-fictitious autobiography depicted Zhou as a landlord who allegedly mimicked a crowing rooster to get his hired laborers to work early.

All of Zhou's lands were redistributed and his family was kicked out of their house. Zhou was beaten to death during a "struggle session" and his wife killed herself by jumping off a mountain after being told to borrow money from relatives to "temper her crimes."

"The family was totally destroyed," Meng Lingqian, Zhou's great-grandson, told the Global Times.

These events still haunt the family today. Meng tells of how his colleagues and neighbors make fun of his family history. "I will never forget about this humiliation," Meng, a journalist at a local newspaper, told the Global Times.

Restore their names

To seek out the truth and rectify their family names has become a common goal for some of the descendants of these landlords.

In the 1990s,  Liu Xiaofei began to visit tenants, farmers and neighbors and work as a narrator in the museum. "I have to give a good account of myself and my family," Meng, told the Global Times.

They endure the cost of their struggle by themselves: Liu Xiaofei relies on his pension of 2,000 yuan ($327) a month while Meng depends on his low wage to travel to collect materials and interview people. Meng has visited libraries in Beijing and Liaoning dozens of times in search of exonerating documents.

They have found something in common, namely that their ancestors were not as vicious as the propaganda made them out to be. Somehow, Meng said, his great-grandfather prospered due to long-term saving and diligence, not by exploiting farmers.

"I have visited a lot of tenants who worked for my grandfather. They said they were always welcomed and fed meat dishes when they went to my grandfather's house to pay their grain tax. How could they depict my grandfather as a villain?" Liu Xiaofei, told the Global Times, raising his voice in anger.

In Liu Xiaofei's eyes, his grandfather "contributed greatly to the education and economic development of Sichuan and built many basic infrastructures in Dayi county."

There are historical records showing that Liu Wencai built a public school, a dam and a road for the village, said Liu Xiaofei.

Liu Xiaofei's investigation has strongly contrasted with the official image of Liu Wencai. 

In order to educate people, Liu's former residency was turned into a museum, a class struggle education site for visitors and his former tenants to recall the suffering of the time.

Most stories and exhibits are about Liu's luxurious life and his exploitation of tenants.

To enhance the effect, local authorities asked artists to create a life-size Rent-Collection Courtyard sculpture of over 100 figures and place them in the museum. All the landlords look devilish while farmers are depicted either in a state of great indignation or misery. The use of this exaggerated technique of expression has caused a sensation.

Liu Xiaofei, who used to live in the house, said life was not so extravagant.

"They placed a Ford sedan at the entrance of the museum, saying it belonged to my grandfather. But he never owned a car. They did so to cover up the good deeds that my grandfather had done like paving a road for the villagers," Liu Xiaofei said. The sedan was eventually removed from the museum.

Leng Yueying, a tenant who allegedly worked in Liu's manor for a short time, was asked to give speeches nationwide. In her renowned speeches, she proclaimed she was thrown into a "water dungeon" cell for seven days and nights shortly after giving birth to her daughter.

Leng soon became a political star and the museum set up a room with several inches of water covering the floor as a "water dungeon" where Liu allegedly detained disobedient farmers.

However, the authenticity of the water dungeon was dismissed in 1988 by historians and the museum changed the room's plaque to indicate it was a "opium storage room."

However, neither of the investigative findings made by Liu Xiaofei and Meng Lingqian have yet been recognized by the authorities. It remains difficult for them to access files on that period of history in national archives.

Meng's book, Roosters Never Crow At Midnight, was withdrawn from sale after being published in 2010. The book mainly explains how stories were fabricated and how Gao Yubao, a semi-illiterate man, was packaged as an inspiring writer to fulfill the political need. His book has been published in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Not unanimous

Challenging history is not fully welcomed by all the descendants of the accused landlords. Outside of Liu Xiaofei and Meng, other descendants of landlords Liu and Zhou have showed little interest in amending the history.

Some grass-roots discussions on the authenticity of the history of the landlords have also been banned. In 1999, Sichuan author Xiao Shu wrote a book named The Truth on Liu Wencai, offering a more positive evaluation of Liu, but it was also banned.

Tan Song, an associate professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Chongqing Normal University, has investigated Liu Wencai by visiting over 30 tenants and neighbors since 2008, and has a comparatively objective opinion of the man.

"As the core ideology of the time was class struggle, it was not abnormal to exaggerate the viciousness of landlords and the miserable life of farmers. Due to the historical reasons, it will take some time to restore the truth of the facts that have been over-hyped," Tan, said.

However, he opposed Liu Xiaofei's provocative explanations in the museum, as he worries that it "may mess up Liu Xiaofei's relationships with the museum."

"He has become too extreme. His thoughts have become trapped in a routine where things are only black or white. We should see the world in a comprehensive and complete way," Tan said.