15 Week 4: Life and Work in Communist China during the Cultural Revolution

While the 1950s, for many Americans, signified the age of “back to normalcy,” a conservative and subdued lifestyle compared with the 1960s, in China, the 1950s saw radical social transformations that involved hundreds of millions of lives. Unlike capitalism, the goal of Communism was to introduce radical social transformation that theoretically aimed at complete equality of social classes. It was more easily said than done, especially for the Chinese Communists, the majority of whom were uneducated peasants and other non-professionals. Although a relatively small group of Communists were well educated, of middle class background, and mostly among the leadership, the winning of the Communist revolution depended on the masses of grassroots Communists.

Although the two groups allied during the war against the Japanese invaders during the Chinese war against Japan (1937-45), which constituted part of the Pacific phase of World War II, and against the republican Chinese government, the Nationalists, after they succeeded in taking over the government, they could no longer cover up their differences.

Rift within the Chinese Communist Party in the 1950s

The Communist call for equality could not overcome the deep-seated mistrust and lack of communication between the urban/educated and rural/illiterate Communists. Reflected at a higher level, the question was what goals should Communist policies reflect: a technocratic focus on economic development, or a continuous emphasis on political revolutions and mass mobilization. The continuous political movements that followed indicated a lack of effective new means for the Communists to bind the country together except for the traditional forms of mass political mobilization, which the Communists applied successfully in the late 1940s and early 1950s to win the masses over. During the 1940s, the Communists used this form of mass mobilization to conduct land redistribution: in villages where large wealthy landlords existed, they would conduct mass meetings where poor peasants were asked to go up one by one to empty their grievances against the landlord, e.g. charging high interest rates on loans, high rents on tenant farmers, etc. These “mass criticism” meetings were followed by the confiscation and redistribution of the landlord’s land. Many poor peasants joined the Communist Party after such land redistribution to protect their newly acquired land.

Political movements and mass mobilization as the Communists’ means of establishing social control.

Because of the tension among the different social groups within Communism, and because the Communists lacked effective new policies to establish social control, in the face of foreign threat (e.g. the Korean War, 1950-53, and the possible U.S. landing in China via Taiwan as well as north Korea), Chinese Communists often triumphed against dissenting colleagues who argued for a technocratic approach that focused on the urban areas and on economic/industrial development, and resorted to the traditional strategies of mass political mobilization, which they had used in the 1940s and early 1950s, in having peasants condemn their landlords, redistributing land, abolishing arranged marriages, etc., thus winning over a large spectrum of lower classes in Chinese society. To establish a unified society, Communist China often used coercive measures in the 1950s-60s to define who did not belong to the proletarian classes, designating enemies of the people, and coercing them to recant and reform.

Political movements in the 1950s:

Social classification: every one in China was put into a social category, such as workers, poor peasants, middle level peasants, landlords, poor city residents, etc.

The Counterrevolutionaries Campaign (1950): arrest of remaing Nationalist soldiers, spies, and others against the Communist regime.
The Three Antis and Five Antis campaign (1951-1952): anti-corruption, anti-waste, and anti-bureaucratism; anti-bribery, anti-tax evasion, anti-cost reduction through quality reduction; anti-theft of state property, and anti-espionage of state economic intelligence (the last five primarily targeted against private businesses).
Campaign against hidden revolutionaries (1955).
The Double-Hundred Policy and Anti-rightist campaign (https://chineseposters.net/themes/double-hundred-policy)
The Great Leap Forward (1958) (https://chineseposters.net/themes/great-leap-forward)

The early political campaigns were aimed at establishing certain guidelines for the newly established Communist China. The early social classification campaign was to determine who should be the greatest beneficiaries of the socialist system, in terms of joining the Communist Party, chances of going to college, promotion and salary raises in the work place (although not exclusively by those criteria). Those who were not classified as workers, peasants, and soldiers, the “proper” social classes that constituted the “people” in Communist China, were to be worked on so that they would gradually see eye to eye as those of the people–it was believed that the social background of someone determined their world view. This belief originated from the Marxist materialist position: one’s class background was determined by economic interests, and economic interests determined one’s attitude toward things in life. It was also influenced by traditional Chinese beliefs in the genealogy: if parents think in a way, children are likely to think in the same way. A traditional jingo went: the dragon begets dragon, the phoenix begets phoenix, and the son of the rat digs holes in the ground. During the Cultural Revolution, this jingo was turned into: if the father is a hero, so is the son; if the father is a counter-revolutionary, the son must be a son of a bitch.

The social classification paved the way for the next wave of social transformation. Those who voiced dissent against Communist party policies were labeled “counter-revolutionaries” or “against the people”, which were now crimes that would lead to imprisonment or labor camps. In 1957, party leader Mao Zedong wanted to sound out the opinions of the intellectuals about the Communist Party. When the criticism was much more extensive than he anticipated, he decided to muffle these critics by labeling them “rightists.” Historically, left was associated with radicalism and right with conservatism, so the label “rightist” implied over-conservatism in a radical socialist society. Rightists were often thrown into prison or sent to labor camps.

These political movements mobilized the masses to conform to the party line, and enabled the party to implement its programs with little opposition. It was against the background of these political movements that the Chinese government completed its land collectivization movement and collectivization movement of factories and companies in the cities in the 1950s. The partially market economy of republican China was now replaced by an almost completely planned economy. Although allowed to some extent in the 1950s, profit making and the free market were completely abolished in the 1960s, especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Commune peasants (starting from 1958) were required to sell all their produce except for a small amount for their own consumption at a price set by the state. The price of everything was set by the state, and kept artificially low. In order to keep prices low, a ration system was created, including coupons for staple food, cloth, cooking oil, eggs, tofu, other soybean products, sesame butter, among other things. Every household had a registration book of the names of the members of the household and every month a household gets the coupons for that month from the local public security bureau based on the household registration book. And every household was registered with the local public security bureau. Free mobility within the country was prohibited. One could change one’s workplace (which was now assigned to one by the state) only with the approval of one’s work unit and one could change one’s residency only because of several reasons, including marriage with someone outside of the city/region, state decision to change the person’s work unit, among others. Still, any decision to move had to be approved of by the state, and there were many instances of husband/wife working in two separate cities and meeting only twice a year. The household registration system went hand in hand with a socialist planned economy, and was effective especially because of the ration system, which means you could not buy many necessities of life if you relocated without approval of the state: as after you moved, your household was still registered in your old residency and ration coupons could only be collected from there.

How political campaigns impact ordinary lives:

In this class, we have picked the life of one young woman Rae Yang as an example to reflect on the impact of political movements on ordinary lives in Communist China. Yang came from Beijing, the capital of China, and a privileged, revolutionary Communist family background. Her father joined the Communist cause back in the 1930s. All Communist party members who joined during the 1930s or earlier would be considered seniors in the Communist cause by the 1950s. That was why her father became the Chinese ambassador to Switzerland in the early 1950s. Yang’s paternal side were Manchus, and her greatgrandfather was an official in charge of punishments in the Qing Dynasty court, which explained why her grandmother had a house in an exquisite courtyard.

Living in Communist China that emphasized the importance of a revolutionary family background, however, did not mean everything would go your way. The political movements that swept across China from the 1950s on involved many members of the Communist Party, to such an extent that by the 1960s, it became very much a fratricide, comrades killing comrades. Two political movements are covered in the chapters for this week’s reading. The book begins with the author’s flashback to her days working in northeast China (Manchuria) as a high school graduate who went to the countryside to “bridge the gap between the urban and the rural,” as millions of urban youth did, during the Cultural Revolution. She will get back to this episode of her life later. Another political movement she touched on was the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, when both her maternal and paternal uncles were charged as “rightists” and sent to the labor camps. She gave a more detailed account of her paternal uncle, with whom she had a closer relationship. What is notable with her paternal uncle’s crime was that he did not say anything against the Communist Party, but just blocked an attempt at corruption by some party members. The “Rightist” label was a retaliation against what he had done. This type of political retaliation was extremely common in Communist China, where the best way to persecute someone was to fabricate some political crime against that person.

The cultural revolution (1966-1976)

The divergence within the Communist party: between those who came from the city and those from the country, and between the educated and illiterate, led to differences in state policies: should the state pursue a technocratic approach to economy, and focus on establishing a select number of schools training professionals, which would certainly leave a large number of those illiterate revolutionaries from a rural background behind, or should it develop China’s economy from a grass-roots level, using the style of mass mobilization.  The political campaigns of the late 1950s, the Anti-Rightist movement, the Great Leap Forward, were grounds for these two contrasting views to unravel.  The most thorough and fierce struggle between these two groups within the Communist Party was carried out in the form of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).   The CR was begun as a way to purge the technocrats from the party, and Chairman Mao Zedong of the Communist Party again used the strategy of mass mobilization, in the form of Red Guards, Tiananmen Square parades, mass criticism meetings, and parades of the “bad elements”.  Mao also wanted to transform Chinese culture through the CR, including bridging the gap between the country and the city, and the educated and the illiterate.  To do so he sent millions of Chinese high school graduates to the countryside in the name of reeducation.  Although many of them have returned to the cities today, many have permanently settled in the countryside because they married local farmers, which was a condition that barred their return back to their hometown cities after the CR was over. 

The Cultural Revolution, as suggested by the title, was a movement to transform the Chinese culture by, according to Mao Tse-tung (Zedong), uprooting it from feudal and bourgeois backgrounds of pre-Communist China and turning it completely into a socialist state. It started with Mao’s article “Bombing the headquarters [of the feudal and bourgeois]” in 1966. Mao interviewed high school students dissatisfied with the college examination system and told them that rebellion [against their teachers] was justified.

The Cultural Revolution as Communist youth movement

From the beginning of CR, the Chinese youth were an important force Mao relied on to combat his opponents in the Communist Party. The Red Guards, as these high school students were called, wore red armbands to distinguish themselves from other high school students. They were guards of Mao against his (black) capitalist-roader opponents. Almost overnight, high school kids found themselves empowered by the number one leader of the country. They now, as Rae Yang recounts, were able to knock on people’s door and interrogate them in their private homes or in public places, their red guard armband being the only thing needed to provide them with authority.

The red guards not only interrogated people, they often took over the leadership of institutions: hospitals, schools, factories. By now, the red guards were no longer confined to high school students, but also workers and others who were from a good class background, i.e. from poor, working-class background. Mao also encouraged them to communicate with one another across China. So almost overnight, Chinese trains were filled with red guards who traveled around in response to Mao’s call, of course without purchasing their train tickets. They also often “made revolution” on their way, as Rae Yang did on her visit to Mount Hua, a very famous tourist site in China. Many red guards sincerely believed they were continuing a revolution started by their forefathers and led by Mao that the capitalist roaders tried to undermine. They wanted to perpetuate a revolutionary spirit by reexperiencing what the Chinese Communist Party experienced in history, such as the Long March (Oct.1934-Oct.1935) when the Communists trekked for about 6,000 miles from southeast to northwest China as a strategic withdrawal after defeat by the Nationalists in 1934, averaging 17 miles per day. Rae Yang narrates her experience of trying to live up to that record by actually attempting to walk to Yanan, a city in Shaanxi Province in the northwest and final destination of the Long March in 1935. Yanan was since called the “cradle of the Chinese revolution.”

The Red Guards’ acceptance of their call in the CR was the result of years of moral indoctrination of heroism and selfless sacrifice for the Communist cause. Individualism and independent thinking were long criticized as “bourgeois,” thus any one with doubts about the CR, as Yang sometimes did, would often feel ashamed of themselves, and at least not talk about their thoughts in public.

The Red Guards’ participation in the CR, however, soon went awry. For one thing, most of them were young, and students. They soon fell into factional struggles against one another. And they were really not suited to govern the institutions they occupied. They were creating embarrassment to Mao. Mao was ready to retire and disperse them by 1967, and to use them to realize another of his goals.

Mao’s vision to fully integrate the Chinese educated and uneducated, the city and the country found its way in the reeducation of urban educated youth. Starting from 1967, the graduating classes of junior and senior high school were required to go and work in the countryside, with no date of return.

This website (https://chineseposters.net/themes/up-to-the-mountains) provides a vivid illustration of the reeducation movement of urban youth in the countryside. 

This week’s assignment: Watch “Balzac and the Chinese Seamstress,” a movie about  two Chinese urban youth, Luo and Ma, who were sent to the countryside for reeducation during the Cultural Revolution. They discovered a hidden cache of forbidden Western books, including works by Balzac, and embarked on a journey of self-discovery and imagination.