The Urban Scene – the Real Transition to Socialism (1953 to 1956)

So Mao adopted his first Soviet-style Five-Year Plan for the years 1953 to 1957. Its key strategies involved (apart from the development of rural productivity as I discussed in an earlier post) rapid development of heavy industry and dependence on Soviet advice and technical and economic assistance. The workers became a privileged class, socially, economically and politically, over the peasants for the first time.

The peasants began to be relatively more exploited, though the workers were, too, as they were all pressured to meet Mao’s goals that turned out to be quite unrealistic in this period and with this style of economic development. Consumption was also explicitly limited. Hierarchy and bureaucracy became pervasive as the work place and its demands assumed the positions of centres of all urban life.

Almost all of this was at obvious odds with Mao’s innovation of the Yan’an-style ‘mass line’ and Mao himself would soon become a critic of this centralisation of control along with his people.

The next main problem was that agriculture simply could not be equipped so quickly for its role as funder of industrial growth (which occasioned excessive pressure and performance anxiety in the countryside to meet central goals).

Finally, there was the natural cultural conflict between the careerist bureaucratic style of new cadre and the old style Yan’an cadre of self-sacrifice.

The work unit (danwei) system had also created egalitarian collectivism which clashed with the hierarchical ‘one-man-management’ methods of the Soviet-style bureaucracy. This clash didn’t sit well with the masses any more than the new style cadres did.

There was also a lot of the city/country divide in the new contradictions.

In the cities the bureaucrats quickly became unpopular with the workers the bureaucracy was supposed to be serving as things seemed to not live up to their promise (the Obama effect with bells on).