The Case of Comrade Hou - Arts & Humanities Assignment Help

Assignment Task

THE SCENARIO
A role-playing exercise for understanding class conflict, women’s rights, and popular ideas of justice in the Chinese Revolution: The Case of Comrade Hou © Kenneth
Pomeranz
The story below is a composite, combining features from many actual life stories. Your written assignment is to treat this information as the facts of the case, and imagine that you are a member of a 3-member team of local officials who have to decide whether to permit or forbid the marriage of Hou Shifei and Wang Meilin. (More about the team of judges is explained below). You should also come to class that day prepared to participate in a discussion of these opinions. I strongly advise you to do the rest of the previous week's (week 8) reading before writing this paper, since it provides useful background for the assignment: the bare bones story of the period leading up to land reform is also covered (more briefly) in the background given below.

The Case of Comrade Hou
The year is 1948.
Hou Shifei's Early Life
Hou Shifei is a 33-year old unmarried labourer in Wangjiacun, a particularly poor village of 800 people in a poor area of North China's Hebei province. His father was a poor peasant who owned a very small plot of land; he had an older sister and an older brother. During the Great Famine of 1920, Hou's father borrowed money at very high interest from a local landlord (and distant cousin) named Wang Fuqiang and pledged the family land as security. Three years later, when the loan was still not repaid, Wang tried to take the family land; in order to avoid this, Hou's father accepted an alternate arrangement in which Hou (then 8 years old) would work as an unpaid servant in Wang's house until the debt was repaid. Four years later, it had become clear that the debt would never be repaid; in fact, further hard times had forced the family to sell Hou's older sister as a concubine to an army officer stationed in a nearby town. (The officer was later transferred and nobody knows what became of Hou's sister.) At this point, Wang Fuqiang gave Hou's father a little more money, and the transfer of Hou to Wang's household was made permanent. Hou's family had hoped to use this money for the wedding of Hou's older brother; unfortunately the brother was drafted, developed an opium habit in the army, and lost both the money intended for his wedding and the family land. Hou's father died soon thereafter; his mother wandered off to beg during a famine in 1935 and was never heard from again.
As a small boy, Hou's tasks for the Wang family included feeding the pigs, gathering firewood and cleaning up; he lived and ate in a small shed near the animals. As he got older, he began to do heavy labor in the fields and around the house; he received his meals, a bed and a tiny amount of cash each month. While he would occasionally buy cigarettes or liquor when he hung out with other poor laborers in the nearby market town, he spent most of his tiny earnings on personal necessities, including a bare minimum of ritual expenses (e.g. incense sticks to burn in front of his parents' tablets on special holidays). Hou had once hoped that Wang Fuqiang would
arrange a match for him with a poor girl from a surrounding village, but it gradually became clear that this would not happen. Moreover, as Hou reached adulthood, Wang's treatment of him became brutal; he was frequently beaten for very minor offenses, and his rations became more and more inadequate.

This Arts & Humanities Assignment has been solved by our Arts & Humanities experts at My Uni Paper. Our Assignment Writing Experts are efficient to provide a fresh solution to this question. We are serving more than 10000+ Students in Australia, UK & US by helping them to score HD in their academics. Our Experts are well trained to follow all marking rubrics & referencing style.
Be it a used or new solution, the quality of the work submitted by our assignment experts remains unhampered. You may continue to expect the same or even better quality with the used and new assignment solution files respectively. There’s one thing to be noticed that you could choose one between the two and acquire an HD either way. You could choose a new assignment solution file to get yourself an exclusive, plagiarism (with free Turnitin file), expert quality assignment or order an old solution file that was considered worthy of the highest distinction.