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.

More on the particular recipe of Maoism for Mass Mobilisation, Five Struggles at Yan’an and Liu Shaoqi

Liu Shaoqi (1898 to 1969) was Mao’s deputy until he was purged during the Cultural Revolution and as such a major early CCP theorist and thinker. He is known especially in theoretical terms for his contribution to the theory of CCP mass mobilisation. He compared the arrival of the new consciousness for the peasants to having a new head placed on their shoulders and claimed a peasant had first given him this image.

Here’s Liu on mass mobilisation from ‘On the Mass Movement for Rent and Interest Reduction’ in Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, Vol 1, pp. 235-6:

We should carefully prepare a talk, the gist of which might run: Who created the world? The workers and peasants did. Where do our food and houses come from? They are created by the workers and peasants... The experiences of peasant struggles in other places and the success of the revolution in the Soviet Union should be used to drive home the point that the workers and peasants should become masters of society. Once they appreciate this truth, they will be in high spirits and will raise the demand to turn the existing world upside down and wipe out the landlords altogether... When they first became politically awakened, many peasants in central China were so excited that they could hardly sleep at night. They approached the work teams, asking all sorts of questions. In this way, the peasants acquired revolutionary ideology or, to use their expression, “had a new head” placed on their shoulders. This type of stimulation is what we mean by Marxist-Leninist education of the peasants. It is an enlightenment campaign of a new form – class education. If it is carried out successfully, the peasants will follow us and will not have misgivings or waver when things are not going smoothly.

As it happens, Liu also illustrates (by his own dramatic rises and falls essentially at the whim of Mao) the inherent instability of the methods of Maoism involved in effecting such mystical transformations. Mao did not envisage stability but he rather imagined continual instability (and contradictions) arising from his revolution. He saw continual struggle and contestation (even within the party organisation) as a good thing (as long as he ultimately won the war, as it turned out). He promoted criticism and self-criticism as part of what he considered was a vital process.

In the Yan’an period, Mao was challenged by five other potential leaders over five issues:

1) By Zhang Guotao over military tactics and leadership;

2) By Liu Zhidan over the predominance of the party centre over localised centres of power;

3) By Wang Ming (with other Soviet trained intellectuals) over ideological control;

4) By Wang Shiwei over the intellectual freedom of intellectuals and artists; and

5) By Ding Ling over Mao’s preference to subordinate women’s rights to the goals of the larger revolutionary project.

Several problems have arisen for Maoists both in claiming to be Marxist and in claiming that Maoism will lead to utopia. The rest of this history will explore in part how the four main problems below (two of each type) continued to be wrestled with by especially CCP leaders and theorists and with what results for the theory and practice of CCP rule in the PRC.

The first two concern whether Mao is even a Marxist having appealed to the peasants rather than the proletariat for leadership and having not waited until Capitalism had become developed to revolt. The second issue was of course also faced (and was dealt with) by the theory of Leninism and Mao dealt with the first but discussion continues.

Some of the main problems for utopia may include the subordination of the rights of intellectuals, women, locals and artists to the struggle and the central controllers. The contradictory issue perhaps at the heart of Maoism is broad: how can a strong, unified and centralised system, as envisaged and practiced by Mao, avoid irreconcilable tension with the ‘mass line’ approach to government of, by and for the people fully valuing local initiative and mass participation?

In the next post I will move on to the first decade of CCP rule and focus on rural reforms. In subsequent posts I’ll go on to outline reforms made in the cities.

The Role of the Cadres and “Pastoral” Leadership set up by Mao at this early stage

The local CCP official or cadre (ganbu – 幹部 (later 干部 with Mao’s introduction of simplified Chinese from 1949)) was accorded great significance in Chinese Communism by Mao as a pastor and in maintaining the links required by the “mass line” discussed in earlier posts.

Each ganbu had responsibility for his or her particular ‘flock’ (e.g. an army unit, a village or a factory, or part thereof) and their ‘pastoral’ needs. The ganbus were, of course, expected to be models of ethical behaviour, selfless and devoted to the flock and the revolution, as they put party policies into effect at the local level and sought feedback. Their objective was salvation of all members of the relevant group and utopia by bringing on the arrival of true Communism (as per the model of the USSR that was held up). A called-for spirit of self-sacrifice for the sake and salvation of the group and the centrality to CCP discourse of the cult of the Communist martyr began here. This began with the eulogising of ‘the Yan’an Spirit’. Cadres in particular were expected to solve problems of individuals as counsellors and social workers up to and including providing direct help and aid to peasant families in difficulty. As pastors, they were responsible for the minds, souls and Communist education, class consciousness (and propagandising) of the whole group.

Practical and Theoretical Maoism v Marxism-Leninism

So now that the CCP and Mao have triumphed in my history (for the time being, at least) it's time for a bit more of a Marxism-Leninism/Mao Zedong Thought primer (as the theory and practice had been developed in China up to this point, at any rate).

The Maoism I’m discussing here is the theoretical (but especially practical) Maoism of the Yan’an decade (roughly 1940 to early 1949) that gained the popular support which led to the ouster of the GMD. I’ve already discussed a few differences Mao had had from early in his career with the ideas of Marx but it’s worth putting some flesh on how this was understood (and also how pragmatically Mao put his ideas before the population). He also had issues with the ideas of Lenin and I’ll discuss here (and in later posts) how Mao adapted Marxism/Leninism to specifically Chinese conditions.

The first thing to note is that Marx was a westerner who lived from 1818 to 1883 in the West. His location is important in understanding why he had the ideas he did. The theory relevant here is Marx’s theory of historical materialism, the essence of which is that progress is inevitable in history towards a final state of Communist society. Further to that the progress is driven by changes in modes of production (an economic matter) precipitated by class struggle.

Marx named four progressive stages of history before Communism that he thought all societies progress through before attaining Communism: primitive society, slave society, feudal society and Capitalist or bourgeois society. He also thought each progressive change required an actual revolution to bring it about. In turn, the causes of each revolution for Marx are ‘contradictions’ in the economic organisation inherent in every form of society except Communist society and resultant ‘class struggle’. The contradictions involve forms of exploitation of majority classes by minority classes.

Marx’s special analysis of Capitalism was that a small group, the Capitalists, exploited the majority workers’ class by expropriating the ‘surplus value’ produced by the labour of workers but that this pre-Communist system carried within itself, as usual, the seeds of its own destruction: it brought large numbers of workers (the proletariat) together in cities where they would naturally develop a political class consciousness and begin to organise themselves for revolution.

The oppressed class always revolts in Marx’s schema and societies always progress in this way. This has been regarded as deterministic and based more or less purely on economic circumstances. Economic relations form the ‘base’ of society for Marx. Political and social relationships are the ‘superstructure’ over and determined by this base. So for Marx the required advanced political ‘consciousness’ for revolt to occur against Capitalist society requires the economics to be right. There had to be a modern urban industrial economy in place. It was an ‘if and only if’ proposition. Marx did, however, allow that ‘agency’ (active will) was required in some form in order to bring about the organisation of the workers for the Communist revolution. He, himself, tried and failed to bring about revolutions in the developed world of his own time and admired other attempts.

Lenin lived from 1870 to 1924 again in the West. Again his theory was influenced by where and who he was (and, in his case, by the revolution he was able to bring about). There were about four variations to Marxism that justify the name of a new theory: Marxism/Leninism. Here they are:

1) As in the USSR, a ‘vanguard party’ of the most politically enlightened workers should lead the revolution. Lenin led his version of such a party;

2) The party should seize state power and establish a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The state itself would ultimately ‘wither away’ as unnecessary but in the meantime it should be strictly controlled by the party, socialist and centralised;

3) The party should be practical about its application of Marxist principles; and

4) Lenin’s theory of economic imperialism (that I’ve already discussed) placed the initial burden on leaders like him in less developed countries than envisioned by Marx (but especially also upon Mao, for example, in colonies with various degrees of imperialist control) but also held forth the promise of international cooperation between the vanguard parties and eventual worldwide revolution brought on initially by independence of the colonies (Mao’s first addition to this part of the theory was to recognise the status of semi-colonies such as China as valid contributors, too). Lenin foresaw that ‘nationalist’ independence coalitions required to force this independence could include, at first, classes other than the proletariat (other nationalist classes) such as peasants (and even the middle class and what he called ‘national capitalists’).

Mao lived from 1893 to 1976 in China. His understanding was perhaps even more dependent upon his location because he spent most of his life in China rarely travelling anywhere else. He was a Chinese patriot and nationalist before he became a Marxist and remained a revolutionary Chinese nationalist. He first became politically active in a big way in the period following the nationalist and revolutionary May Fourth protests of 1919 and while nationalism was formally regarded by Marxism/Leninism as a ‘false consciousness’ it was a consciousness that certainly motivated him (Stalin, too, had become more nationalistic than Lenin in response to his concerns at the international hostility he believed he faced).

Having said all that, the first tenet of Maoism (or Mao Zedong Thought as it is now called in China) is that Marxism/Leninism was a valid guiding principle consistent with his nationalism albeit that it required Sinification (i.e. it had to be adapted to concrete Chinese circumstances). Proponents of the Sinification would argue that both Marx and Lenin advocated pragmatic flexibility in response to conditions on the ground (or indeed ideological development) in various spheres of revolutionary action.

Here’s Mao on Marxism and this issue from his “The Sinification of Marxism” in Schram (ed.) The Political Thought of Mao Tsetung, pp. 172-3:

Concrete Marxism is Marxism that has taken on a national form, that is, Marxism applied to the concrete struggle in the concrete conditions prevailing in China, and not Marxism abstractly used... We must discard our dogmatism and replace it by a new and vital Chinese style and manner, pleasing to the eye and to the ear of the Chinese common people.

The next tenet (relying on the first) was that as China was a semi-feudal semi-colony the ultimate enemies to be dealt with there were feudal landlords and all those who supported the imperialism of the West (especially imperialism within China). In reliance on this in turn (especially since his famous speech of 1927 on how the revolution should be conducted in China) Mao decided that the major revolutionary force in China should be the many poor peasants under the yoke of the landlords and in the thrall of the foreigners and not the tiny proletariat. In his 1927 speech he predicted that the party could either march at the head of the poor peasants, be swept along by their immense and furious force or be left in their wake. The poorest peasants were certainly both by far the largest and the most exploited class in China at the time (and hence also the class with by far the most to gain and the least to lose from violent revolution of the type Mao expected would be required). The proto-Capitalist workers of the cities (exploited though they were) had actually proved relatively reticent about revolution through the 1920s.

Here’s Mao on the peasants from his 1927 “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” from Selected Works, Vol. I, pp. 23-24:

In a very short time, in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves. Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticising? Or to stand in their way and oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly.

Mao was a voluntarist by which I mean he emphasised the role of the agency of advanced elements like party members in creating the requisite revolutionary consciousness for Communism in even the peasants in China’s merely proto-Capitalist stage of development. So this is opposed to the economic determinism of Marx (though he was never completely deterministic). Periodic regular so-called “rectification movements” (beginning with the first in 1942) with the aim of ensuring ideological uniformity are examples of the teaching of peasants by advanced elements that Mao considered possible. Re-education and reform were emphasised then over punishment and purging. They were internal party campaigns for the correction of errors and the education first of the cadres, who would then be in a better position to correctly educate the peasants in right belief.

Mao’s own peasant origins meant that he understood the class better than either Marx or Lenin. Marx thought that they were actually unorganisable. As with Lenin, Mao saw the centralised party as an appropriate vehicle for revolutionary leadership but he introduced the ‘mass line’, as I’ve already mentioned, and was generally critical of undue hierarchy and bureaucracy. Leaders were to live and work among the masses and learn from them and stay in touch with them as well as guide them. More ‘back and forth’ than Lenin had ever allowed in his hierarchical and bureaucratic abstraction of a party system of political control was envisioned (and this didn’t just include ‘back and forth’ between party members and cadres). Peasants knew local conditions best, had good ideas of their own and a continuous and profitable feedback loop between peasant ideas and party policy could be established. Utopia seemed to Mao the only possible eventual outcome.

Here he is on the ‘mass line’ in “Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership” from Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 119:

In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily ‘from the masses, to the masses’. This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them, and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through. And so on over and over again in an endless spiral with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer every time. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge.