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.