Mao in the Balance - Developing Issues of Concern

The problem for the more educated city youth of the era was that having inspired them Mao completed his reform process by sending them to learn from the peasants. The problems for the PRC included that ex Red Guards began to feel used (and abandoned in the countryside). In addition they really did learn from the peasants (that Mao’s China was not working for them well at all) so began to lose faith in the promise of socialism there and had the free time to discuss all of this far enough from the centre of power in Beijing to be dangerous. They had been told by Mao to think for themselves and chose to take it literally. They were now radicalised in ways that Mao had probably not anticipated. They began to genuinely question not only the CCP but also Maoism itself and in fact the whole system. The CR would also have echoes in the culture fever that the people of China would experience later in cinema and other art forms. It was a potent revolution.

While this was going on in the countryside the lifestyle created by the urban work units would produce its own issues. Two ownership models for work unit businesses developed: state ownership of larger enterprises and collective ownership of smaller concerns. In the period from 1952 to 1975 the urban workforce increased from 28.6 million to 82.2 million. The percentage of this group employed in a work unit also increased in the same period from 56% to 99.8%. The number of those workers employed in state owned enterprises as compared to collective businesses also increased from around two to around four times the numbers over the period.

So that was quite a transformation begun by the massive urbanisation and guided by the danwei system devised to facilitate the latter’s success. The work unit one belonged to was usually one of the first questions one was ever asked by a new acquaintance or the authorities. These workers, of course, might be older siblings or cousins of the newly questioning students for the time being banished to the countryside. In a sense they were also under a punishing regime as they weren’t permitted to travel without the written permission of their work units.

In theoretical terms the danwei was supposed to be the correct socialist form of the traditional family (replacing the clans, guilds and gangs) with the ganbu as the family head (and also pastor of the socialist flock). The mass line process was still supposed to operate at this level and also the danwei was a unit for planning purposes promoting productivity and its own self-sufficiency. It was responsible for social security in the form of employment provision, healthcare, housing, childcare, benefits and pensions among other things. The term used for this cradle to grave welfare function was the ‘iron rice bowl’. The danwei was also the policing authority, the mobiliser for political campaigns and work efforts, the issuer of identification documentation, the producer of personnel files and the actual provider of the identity of workers. The policing authority’s role also went to policing of politics and population policy among other things. The provision of sporting and cultural events was included in this conception of the functions of the danwei.

So was this collectivisation the beginning of utopia? No, it probably wasn’t. People were too politicised and factionalised by the nature of the system which was a system of Marxist hermeneutical navel-gazing and propagandistic spin. Bureaucracy flourished despite all of Mao’s sincere efforts and corruption was consequently in part endemic. ‘Connections’ had to be relied on to gain access to adequate resources. Then too there was little real material incentive to work hard and people consequently generally didn’t (once the glamour of Communism began to wear out) with productivity and therefore wealth consequences. The use of ‘connections’ also inevitably led to well-connected but inefficient managers rising to management positions and in turn allocating resources based on ‘connections’.

All this was reformed to some extent later (after Mao) and I’ll discuss the problems further later when I refer to those reforms. In the next post I’ll review a few of the overall assessments made of Mao over the last few decades before properly getting into the post-Mao era.