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Japan's occupation of China ended abruptly the year after Ren Zhengfei's birth, when the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For all the efforts of Ren Moxun and his compatriots, it was America's superior bomb technology that ended the Japanese occupation. In China, there would not yet be peace. Civil war resumed between the Nationalists and Communists. Ren Moxun and Cheng Yuanzhao had six more children, all while both parents worked teaching local students in spare conditions, under the glow of kerosene lamps. Cheng served for a period as an elementary school principal.

In 1949, Mao Zedong emerged victorious. It was clear that Ren Moxun had picked the wrong side by working for the Nationalists during the war. It wasn't yet clear how dire the consequences would be for his family.

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On a foggy morning in 1950, Ren Moxun rode a horse-drawn carriage into the town of Zhenning. The name Zhenning meant "town of peace," but Ren Moxun, seated in the middle of the cart and surrounded by three armed men who kept their Mauser guns trained outward, arrived with some trepidation. The fog was so thick the men could see only a few meters ahead on the winding dirt road, and they feared that unfriendly locals might attack them. Officials had tasked Ren Moxun with launching a new middle school for Bouyei children in Zhenning, one that would teach them the Mandarin Chinese language and help integrate them into the nascent Communist republic. Mao's new government was seeking to solidify its control over a sprawling territory that, for most of its history, had been not a unified whole but self-governing fiefdoms speaking different tongues. A unifying language was not just a linguistic issue but a political one.

Ren Moxun and his colleagues began setting up a new boarding school, going door-to-door to recruit students across the countryside. Fewer than half of the students spoke fluent Mandarin. Many of the older residents didn't speak Mandarin at all. Ren Moxun and his staff learned conversational Bouyei. Attendance was a challenge for students who had to travel a great distance. Many families also couldn't afford the school fees. Ren Moxun and his staff came up with a solution: the students and faculty would make up the budget shortfall through part-time farming. He got the government to give them an acre of land, where the students planted crops and raised pigs. The labor of the students and teachers enabled the school to cover its costs, including meals and a free blue uniform for each student.

Mao's officials believed they were extending a civilizing influence to the nation's frontiers—Guizhou in the south, Inner Mongolia in the north, Tibet and Xinjiang in the west. The residents didn't necessarily see it that way. They had lived for centuries with their own languages and customs, and they were now being compelled to assimilate. There were those who did not like Ren Moxun and his school either. After someone threatened to kill him with a hand grenade—the precise reasons are unclear—the school was issued four rifles to protect the staff and students.

One of Ren Moxun's objectives was to inculcate his students with the right beliefs. "Principal Ren, your guiding ideology must be clear," a visiting official instructed him. "You must make clear who the enemies are, who we are, who are our friends." Ren Moxun organized rallies for the students to denounce their enemies. The enemies at home were the oppressive landlords. The enemies abroad were the Americans, who were waging war against North Korea, one of China's allies. Ren Moxun reported that the "scoundrels" hidden among the teachers were successfully caught through these criticism sessions, which were often intense, with students bursting into tears. In the anti-America sessions, students offered up secondhand accounts of atrocities committed by US troops in the area, presumably when they had passed through during World War II. One student said a US soldier had shot a farmer for sport near the Yellow Fruit Waterfall. Another said a classmate's sister had been dragged into a jeep and raped. It was hard to say what, exactly, had happened years ago with US soldiers, but the resentment against America was certainly real.

Ren Moxun was a man of quiet ambition, and by age forty-five, he was beginning to gain national attention for his work. In 1955, a prominent linguistic journal published a paper of his on teaching Mandarin Chinese to Bouyei children. He outlined their successes in connecting with their pupils by learning their tongue. He noted that the Bouyei language had been changing rapidly since Mao came to power, with new terms like landlord and land reform added'.' His paper impressed officials at the Ministry of Education enough that they dispatched officials to visit his school. In the autumn of 1955, he was also invited to attend the landmark linguistic conference in Beijing where officials made the controversial decision to simplify the Chinese written language to boost literacy. Arriving in the nation's capital, he posed proudly for a photo on a tree-lined walkway of Beihai Park.

After returning home to Zhenning, Ren Moxun was promoted to dean of the new Duyun Normal College for Nationalities, a teachers' school for local ethnic minority students. His son Ren Zhengfei, then a middle schooler, was astonished when they moved to the county seat and saw the department store. It was his first time seeing a two-story building.

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