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.