Mao’s Era in the Balance - a starting point overview

Social life in Mao’s time thus became the life of the collective in both the countryside and the cities. Mistakes were undoubtedly made but there were also successes and not all of today’s successes can be regarded as despite rather than because of Mao.

The collective life did offer economies of scale in both production and distribution and productivity gains as at least potential benefits. It also allowed the political aims of the state to be most efficiently made manifest to and taken on board by the population. Goals could be clearly seen to be collective goals and were thus uniquely motivating to the community-minded. It was quite a spiritual thing. At the same time the provision of welfare was quite effective in this more localised environment than that of the centralised state planning system. The danwei or factory in the cities and the commune or production brigade in the countryside were expected to be self-sufficient in various welfare arenas.

After some of the disasters in the countryside especially, the collectives began to work rather better after reforms made in 1962. The countryside was now divided into People’s Communes made up of 20 to 30 production brigades that were in turn collectives of 100 to 300 households (the typical village size and the size of the old Higher-stage Agricultural Producers’ Cooperatives). The communes continued to be responsible for things like education, health, military training, grain purchases and infrastructure coordination but production and distribution decision-making returned to a large extent to the more local brigade level. The Communes were now more like local governments than they had ever been intended to be initially. The earning of ‘work points’ over a year was again the basis of distributed income from the brigade level. The brigade or village level was now the official unit of society and for welfare and other local concerns. The famous ‘bare-foot doctors’ worked at this level.

The role of the centre in this was to discover best practice models in all of this both in rural areas and in the cities and propagandise them. Two well known examples of the models promoted in the propaganda were the Dazhai village for the country and Daqing for the cities. The slogans went “in agriculture study Dazhai” and “in industry study Daqing”. Naturally places like Daqing and especially Dazhai in Shanxi Province, west of Beijing, were models in part because they were given special and not necessarily completely transparent resource allocations precisely so that they could appear to be better models than they may in fact actually have been if left to their normal devices. In addition, Mao continued to lionise the peasants generally as a class in his state’s propaganda efforts as he rounded out the CR by sending the Red Guards to the countryside for ‘education’ by them.

Dazhai really was an example to an extent, though, of the transformation of a formerly barren piece of land into a fertile one with all of the mod cons (terracing, dormitory housing and irrigation) by means of collective labour.

Daqing, northeast of Beijing, was a new city established at the site of a significant newly discovered oil field and as such quite important as a model of progress to a developing China that had been previously thought not to possess substantial oil reserves. The workers were doubly praised for working so diligently in the inhospitable north of the country on projects of value to the whole country. Slogans especially praised the self-sacrifice of these workers.

From the Great Leap to the Cultural Revolution and beyond to the eventual demise of Mao

This post is another summary of PRC history (this time taking us from the first most widely recognised failure of Maoism to the last one and finally to its end as an unreconstructed CCP party policy with Mao’s death).

Mao’s extreme belief in voluntarism seems to have been reflected in the rather wildly optimistic Chinese economic forecasting of the 1950s. The CCP was fully expecting that China would be able to overtake Britain in industrial capacity within 15 years. As examples the predicted annual growth rates for the period 1955 to 1958 issued in the years 1955 and 1956 and in March 1958 as the Great Leap was commenced were revised upward dramatically with each new estimate. In 1955 in the first five-year plan as revised the predictions for industry and agriculture were 14.7 and 4.3 percent growth respectively. One year later as the second plan was being prepared, those figures had increased to 20.0 and 7.0 and by the time of the GLF in March 1958 they were a crazy 33.0 and 16.2.

As I’ve already suggested in an earlier post this kind of boosterism as I characterised it tended to produce an unrealistic atmosphere in which it seemed appropriate to misreport production: exaggerated targets produced exaggerated, unreliable reports, which then fed further distortions into the planning process.

The party organisation was made chaotic, the plans were undermined and a massive famine was the major result. Both the transportation and storage systems failed and the commune system contributed to massive wastage of resources. The grain harvest actually fell dramatically in the GLF years, 1958/59 to 1961, and estimates of the famine’s death toll range from 15 million to 45 million. In the period from 1952 to 1958 per capita grain tonnage had actually increased from around 0.325 tonnes to around 0.36 tonnes but had dipped to 0.26 tonnes by 1960 and didn’t recover to 1958 levels until around 1974.

A final result of this massive failure was Khrushchev’s order in July 1960, partly because he saw any further connection with the fiasco and a recalcitrant Mao as embarrassing, to withdraw all soviet assistance (experts fled China hurriedly, shredding blueprints as they went).

There were recriminations within the party in the early 1960s and even Mao resigned as head of state and chief economic planner in favour of his deputy, Liu. Mao had accepted some of the blame and Liu, Zhou and Deng began to reinstitute soviet-style planning infrastructure and to get the economy moving again.

Smaller scale agricultural collectives were re-established and small family plots (and small private incomes) were even permitted again. In the factories the use of material incentives for production that had fallen out of favour was also again in favour. At the same time, peasants and others who had been overworked for years were again allowed spare time.

Officially, though, everything was conveniently blamed upon the Russians (from whom the 1960 split had just occurred) and an actual significant drought.

Mao spent some of the early 1960s mainly studying Chinese classics and other works and partying at his dances (that he increased in frequency from once a week to twice a week) but by 1963 he yearned to return to power.

He was 70 years of age but still dreamed of Communism and believed that virtually he alone knew how (and truly wanted) to bring it about. He was still, of course, revered by the masses and a particularly important supporter in the early 1960s was Lin Biao, whom he had made Minister for Defence. In 1964, Lin arranged for the publication of a book of Mao quotations called “Quotations from Chairman Mao” that many know now as the ‘little red book’. This publication and the deliberate inculcation of children in a Mao personality cult contributed to a resurgence in Mao’s potential power base. The children were taught to revere and trust Mao.

Liu, Zhou and Deng may have felt this process weakened them but never felt able to directly resist it. The Mao cult may have also contributed to their own legitimacy (so long as they didn’t fall foul of Mao, publicly, of course). Publicly they all acknowledged Mao but privately they all tended to ignore his advice (which tended to be too radical).

Mao soon came to think the party needed to be publicly attacked and proceeded to do that via a newspaper ‘piece’. This was the origin of what came to be simply called the Cultural Revolution (CR). He adopted a tactic he had used before of bypassing the party and speaking directly to the most disadvantaged of the masses in order to gain control of the party. They naturally trusted him because of the effect of the long-standing personality cult enhanced in more recent times by the new education and publication of the ‘little red book’.

This foray into political oppositionism led at first to demonstrations and poster campaigns and soon schools and universities were in chaotic disarray (from a traditional educational perspective).

Mao made a point at around this time to publicly go swimming in the strong-flowing Yangzi to demonstrate that he still ‘had it’ even at his advanced age. When Liu, Zhou and Deng (who had previously not wanted his advice finally sought it, he pointedly refused to give it to them. Mao denounced Liu as a counter-revolutionary but as he didn’t yet have the power to remove him to a labour camp or have him executed he was only able to have him demoted to number eight in the regime. Deng was demoted to number six. With Mao’s support Lin Biao became the new head of state (Mao’s old role and Liu’s – Mao had still not formally returned to holding any position).

Groups calling themselves Red Guards formed and in speeches Mao praised their revolutionary spirit and blessed the movement. They were given free travel rights on public transport. In the year 1966 the new school year never started. In October of that year on China’s national day Mao addressed a spectacular and climactic rally at which thousands of ‘little red books’ were raised to salute him.

Mao came out against what he called the ‘four olds’ and western influence of any kind. In response, guards searched and looted homes and temples and destroyed property and people that appeared to represent these things. They encouraged peasants to attack officials.

The labels of old were brought up to persecute even the grandchildren of representatives of former ‘bad’ classes such as the landlord and rich peasant classes and to prevent them having contact with their parents who had at worst been the children of those representatives.

Various old scores were able to be settled under the cover of all of this. Even the expression of sympathy for those who were persecuted brutally in this period was suspected by many to be the expression of a bourgeois emotion.

While violence ruled in some ways in this early part of the CR it appears that going into 1967 there was a fair degree of centralised control exercised notably by Lin and Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. Zhou had attempted to mediate between the sides but had finally been forced (or chose) to side with Mao. When a group of guards finally came for Liu and his wife, Zhou’s intercession on their behalf was to no avail. Deng was exiled. Liu was beaten and placed under house arrest before eventually being imprisoned. His wife was humiliated and sent to a camp never to see her husband again.

Meanwhile at the mass pointy end, guards’ factions began to turn on each other. Groups called ‘rebels’ also began to form (supported by Mao and Jiang) with membership drawn from young people who for class reasons had not been allowed to join the guards. One way or another the factions became armed and certain army units supported certain factions. Factions attempted to take over the party and pitched street battles were fought between various groups. Embassies were also attacked as the complex civil war gained steam.

Mao sought to end all of this in 1968 and the end finally had to be accomplished by the PLA. Mao was still revered in the army. The guards were finally ‘sent down’ to labour in the countryside with the peasants from late in that year.

In April 1969, Mao opened the 9^th Party Congress. The Chinese were fighting the Russians over borders. In these circumstances Mao, quietly at first, made peaceful overtures to the US. He would never publicly admit that this was what he was doing.

Lin opposed this attempt at rapprochement and suffered for it dying while fleeing from the consequences of Mao’s wrath. His death served as the catalyst that woke up large numbers of Chinese people to Mao’s folly of the last few years.

Meanwhile, Nixon visited Beijing in February 1972. The worst of the CR was now over and the ‘barefoot doctor’ scheme of the period was actually found to have been something of a success in getting better health care to rural areas. Many including Deng were later rehabilitated. Mao at 81 was a shadow of his former self but remained a major player until his death.

The year 1976 proved a fateful year. Zhou had become ill with cancer two years earlier and finally died on 8 June 1976. Mao was too ill to attend his funeral. A Tiananmen Square tribute to Zhou turned into a protest against the so-called “Gang of Four” but indirectly against Mao, too. It was violently dealt with and at about that time an earthquake killed about 400,000 people. Traditionally in China such an event portends a change of dynasty and in fact it did. Mao’s death followed close behind it. He never publicly accepted that he had committed any substantial errors.

Land Reform and Social Change in Rural China – 1949 to 1953

The first part of the decade (until 1953) was occupied reproducing ‘New Democracy’ in parts of China (now the PRC) that hadn’t previously been ruled by the CCP. To recap: ‘New Democracy’ was a compromise designed to ease the transition to real CCP rule. This ‘Democratic dictatorship of the people’ was actually based on the promotion of Sun Yat-sen’s ‘three principles of the people’ stated in 1924: national independence, democracy and livelihood. Theoretically, Mao considered this arrival at freedom from external powers, democracy and material well-being and equity a stage of revolution that amounted to the completion of a bourgeois nationalist democratic and capitalist revolution left undone by Sun and the GMD (and a preparatory stage for Marx’s socialist phase of development guided by the party and the later Communist revolution).

Above all, the country needed to be well run to achieve those three goals. The idea was that feudalism and imperialism should be ended in this first period throughout the country (uniting rural and urban nationalist Chinese as the mission of national industrialisation would unite the nationalist Chinese in its cities). Only major feudal landlords and compradors would be adversely affected.

Land reform became national but it began mildly as dictated by the ‘New Democracy’ policy.

Social reforms also occurred as the CCP found its feet aiming to successfully rule a large country for the first time and feed its people both in the country and in cities.

Purity of ideology was a problem as it would be for any ruler and this period of Chinese history demonstrates clearly the tension between political-economic theory and practice. Consolidation of power and the economy was the first priority for the first four or five years of CCP rule. By 1953, however, Mao considered that the usefulness of ‘New Democracy’ and Capitalism was at an end.

The first stage of land reform occurred between 1949 and 1951. The aim was firstly to eliminate the landlord class. Mao had defined all the classes in 1933. He defined the landlord as follows (Selected Works, Vol. 1, pp. 137-9):

A landlord is a person who owns land, does not engage in labour himself, or does so only to a very small extent, and lives by exploiting the peasants. The collection of land rent is his main form of exploitation; in addition, he may lend money, hire labour, or engage in industry or commerce. But his exaction of land rent from the peasants is his principal form of exploitation. ... Warlords, officials, local tyrants and evil gentry are political representatives and exceptionally ruthless members of the landlord class. Minor local tyrants and evil gentry are also very often to be found among the rich peasants [the nearest class to the landlords in Mao’s theory]...

The remaining aims were: to fulfil the promise of ‘land to the tiller’, to extend the CCP organisational structure throughout rural China, to improve the productivity of agriculture and to consolidate rural support for subsequent collectivisation among the natural constituency for radical anti-feudal rule and policy, the poorest of the peasants. The initial redistribution would benefit virtually everybody so it was expected to be a win-win for the revolution. Productivity did in fact increase in this initial period of ‘land to the tiller’ fulfilment (as would be expected when poor peasants could now work land of their own and thus most fully benefit from their labours – it’s basic Capitalism 101). Maurice Meisner called the resulting situation a petty bourgeois utopia par excellence in his history of Mao’s China and after, entitled aptly enough Mao’s China and After: a History of the People’s Republic.

The reform first required the definition of all the rural ‘players’ so that redistribution could be carried out according to formal and just rules. Mao’s landlord definition is above but he also defined rich peasants, upper middle peasants, lower middle peasants, poor peasants and (rural) workers. These labels were then handed down through the generations as though they were the indelible marks of Cain long after the ancestor had been well and truly made one of the dispossessed if he had been a landlord or made relatively rich if had been a rural worker or poor peasant (in fact this attitude persisted until the death of Mao two and a half decades later in 1976). Here are the remainder of Mao’s definitions from 1933 (note that he had not yet completely divided up the middle peasant class but mentions a well-to-do class of the middle peasants that tends to do some exploitation that would later become known as the upper middle peasant class):

The rich peasant as a rule owns land. But some rich peasants own only part of their land and rent the remainder. Others have no land of their own at all and rent all their land. The rich peasant generally has rather more and better implements of production and more liquid capital than the average and engages in labour himself, but always relies on exploitation for part or even the major part of his income. His main form of exploitation is the hiring of labour (long-term labourers). In addition, he ... exploits other peasants by means of land rent, loan interest or in other ways...

Many middle peasants own land. Some own only part of their land and rent the rest. Others own no land of their own at all and rent all their land. All of them have a fair number of farm implements. A middle peasant derives his income wholly or mainly from his own labour. As a rule he does not exploit others and in many cases he himself is exploited by others, having to pay a small amount in land rent and in interest on loans. But generally he does not sell his labour power. Some middle peasants (the well-to-do middle peasants) do practice exploitation to a small extent, but this is not their regular or their main source of income.

Among the poor peasants some own part of their land and have a few odd farm implements, others own no land at all but only a few odd farm implements. As a rule poor peasants have to rent the land they work on and are subjected to exploitation, having to pay land rent and interest on loans and to hire themselves out to some extent. In general, a middle peasant does not need to sell his labour power, while the poor peasant has to sell part of his labour power. This is the principal criterion for distinguishing between a middle and a poor peasant.

The worker (including the farm labourer) as a rule owns no land or farm implements, though some do own a very small amount of land and very few farm implements. Workers make their living wholly or mainly by selling their labour power.

Records (based on the household) from 1941 to 1945 for the central Chinese counties of Xinxin, Erlian, Zhangtang, Xinsi and Baishui indicate that, on a China-wide basis, around 5 to 10 % of China’s rural population were probably considered landlords. The breakdown for the other five classes is: 10% rich peasants, 15% upper middle peasants, 15% lower middle peasants, 50% poor peasants and 2% rural workers. Here are the actual 1941 to 1945 figures for those five counties (again the middle peasant class is not further subdivided here):

	Xinxin	Erlian	Zhangtang	Xinsi	Baishui
Landlord (%)	7.6	7.1	2.3	9.0	5.1
Rich Peasant (%)	4.8	3.5	7.0	10.0	9.0
Middle Peasant (%)	31.0	47.1	34.5	30.0	13.2
Poor Peasant (%)	40.0	34.0	50.5	51.0	72.2
Hired Hand (%)	16.6	2.2	3.6	0.0	Not Known
Other (%)	0.0	6.1	2.1	0.0	Not Known

The classes that were considered acceptably ‘red’ (revolutionary) to the CCP were the lower middle peasants, poor peasants and workers.

The classes having been decided upon in Mao’s theory it was the job of the CCP ‘work team’ (often attached to an advancing army group) to enter a village, contact and mobilise the ‘red classes’, especially, from among the peasants, and organise ‘struggle meetings’ to identify and publicly expose the local tyrants and landlords and their alleged ‘crimes’. Land and other property (including any cash) would then be redistributed fairly equally among the peasants. The party would then recruit members and staff for the local headquarters and form and arm a local ‘people’s militia’ to defend the revolution and police the reforms (many of these militias were also ultimately deployed to fight in the Korean War of the early 1950s). These actions followed the pattern the CCP had already established in areas as they came to control them before the final 1949 victory.

These reforms were accompanied by ‘consciousness raising’ exercises designed to extinguish any tendency to accept feudal norms including serious and systematic humiliations of the landlords (from the ‘struggle meetings’ on, aimed at starkly convincing everyone they no longer had any power at all as a class), destruction of the self-help lineage and clan groups (usually managed by a family member of the landlord class) and redistribution of their property (e.g. schools, temples and family benevolent organisations), banning of the ancestor worship (often promoted by the groups) and other religious practices deemed feudal, the liberation of concubines (concubinage was banned) and the unbinding of women’s bound feet (binding was also now banned). Former temples were often put to utilitarian use as warehouses. Let the petty bourgeois utopia begin!?! Utopia it may have appeared for many but around 2,000,000 people of the rural classes were killed during the reform process of these few years.