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.

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.

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).