Three—
Structure and Its Critique

Revolution, even continuing revolution, is "transitive," implying an object to be overthrown. This object is the structure of authority, which has allegedly forfeited its legitimacy due to some besetting flaw, of which the revolutionary leadership is able to take polemical advantage. While mobilizing the masses against this flawed structure, the revolutionary leadership launches construction of a new structure that will remedy the deficiencies of the old. It soon becomes clear, however, that there is an inherent contradiction between the idea of continuing revolution and any structure at all.

The first part of this chapter examines the evolution of the "bad" and "good" structures of authority during the 1949–66 period. The second half consists of an expostion of the critique of the two structures that consecutively arose in response. The overall trend in this period was for the old structure to lose potency as it came under incessant attack, allowing popular faith to be transferred to the new structure introduced in its place. The ironic corollary of this trend was that as the new structure in turn began to lose credibility as a result of the policy errors of the late 1950s, the old structure could no longer function as a plausible scapegoat. Moreover, as the new structure consolidated itself, its own flaws became salient, stimulating mass grievances and raising the problem for the leadership of what their stance should be toward a second revolution, or "counterrevolution." The immediate response, as witnessed in the case of the Hundred Flowers, was repression. At least for Mao, the implications of such a stance were unacceptable, and he undertook a basic rethinking of the project of continuing revolution that was ultimately to result in the launching of the Cultural Revolution.

Structures

The structure of authority as it existed in China at the time of Liberation was fragmented and inchoate, consisting of a mélange of residual political structures, cultural dispositions, and incompletely reconstructed KMT

institutions. The Chinese never really had an effective centralized national state from the Xinhai Revolution in 1911 to the Communist victory in 1949, and society tended to dissolve like a "sheet of loose sand." Whatever coherence remained was imparted by decentralized local authority structures, primarily by the kinship network and by property rights, as suggested in chapter 2. The tenure of the Nationalist regime was too brief and tempestuous for it ever to bring these local structures under its sway, though it did attempt to negotiate mutually beneficial alliances with local elites.

The Residual Structure

The structure of authority against which the revolution had been successfully launched before 1949 was progressively redefined following the flight of the Nationalist regime to Taiwan. The opposition structure was first conceived to include political opponents who posed a credible threat to the new regime, then it was seen more abstractly in terms of a bourgeois-landlord social class, and finally in terms of residual elements of that class (variously defined). The fact that this progressive redefinition of the opposition coincided with successful efforts to incorporate opponents within the community implied that conflict gradually lost its in-group/out-group clarity and became internecine. It also entailed an increasingly intensive search for opponents.

The regime's first priority was to eliminate its "diehard" opponents. A campaign for the Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries (zhengfan ) was launched in 1950 and, in close connection with agrarian reform, lasted through most of 1951; it resulted in the execution of seven hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand counterrevolutionaries, "not counting those who were imprisoned or put under control," which "should aggregate several millions." The Three-Anti and Five-Anti movements (December 1951–December 1952) also placed the urban bourgeoisie under some constraint, though they were not yet deprived of their property and not usually executed (about five hundred were executed, thirty-four thousand imprisoned, and two thousand committed suicide). A second campaign against counterrevolutionaries, the Sufan (suqing ancang fangeming ), was set in motion in mid-1955 as a sequel to the campaign to criticize Hu Feng.^[1] The chief difference between the Zhengfan and the Sufan campaigns is that the former was conducted in rural areas, small towns, and city slums against those who had served in KMT militia, police, or other "public servants" (qian gongjiao renyuan ), whereas the

[1] Liao Gailong, "Historical Experiences," part 1, pp. 70–73; John Gardner, "The Wu-fan Campaign in Shanghai: A Study in the Consolidation of Urban Control," in A. Doak Barnett, ed., Chinese Communist Politics in Action (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), pp. 477–593.

latter was mainly directed against non-Communist intellectuals. In the course of Sufan, eighty-one thousand intellectuals were "unmasked and punished," and more than three hundred thousand lost their civil rights because of "political unreliability."^[2]

The selection of targets for exemplary criticism in the campaigns involved a more or less elaborate preliminary investigative procedure to ensure that only well-qualified culprits were selected. Political pressures were imposed to intensify the search, particularly during the early phase of the campaigns: beginning in the early 1950s the Party began to set fixed quotas for investigation. By September 1955, 2.2 million people were reported to have been investigated, and one hundred ten thousand "counterrevolutionaries" exposed. In Mao's view about fifty thousand major suspects were still at large, however, and 11 to 12 million people were yet to be investigated when the movement ended.^[3] Target selection in response to administrative quotas resulted in a certain ritualization of the process in some cases, as the same targets were trotted out repeatedly at the commencement of the various campaigns and forced to submit self-criticisms.^[4]

The "principal social contradiction" during this period was defined as the "contradiction between the working class and the broad masses of the people on the one side and the remnant forces of the big bourgeoisie and the landlord class on the other side."^[5] Application of the terminology of class to Chinese social structure entailed rather complex distinctions and subsumptions, which have been competently analyzed elsewhere.^[6] Its application accompanied the successive campaigns to socialize the means of production launched in the early 1950s, resulting in the sorting of the Chinese populace (particularly the rural population—in the cities the Party was somewhat less thorough) into more than sixty class designations. This classification, based on a combination of "class status" (based on occupation during the three years prior to 1949) and "family back-

[2] RR , March 23 and June 18, 1957; as cited in Domes, Government , pp. 48, 276.

[3] See Mao's speech at the Enlarged Sixth Plenum of the Seventh CC, in Wansui (1969), pp. 12–25; an expurgated version may be found in SW , vol. 5: 211–35.

[4] For example, cf. Lai Ying, The Thirty-sixth Way : A Personal Account of Imprisonment and Escape from Red China , trans. Edward Bahr and Sidney Liu (New York: Doubleday, 1969); also the experiences of Liang Heng's parents in Liang and Shapiro, Son of the Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983); and the story of "Old Li" in Richard Bernstein, From the Center of the Earth : The Search for the Truth about China (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), pp. 243–51.

[5] At that time, the remnant forces of the KMT on the mainland amounted to more than a million, and the counterrevolutionaries, including Kuomintang spies, and the "historical counterrevolutionaries," totaled several millions. Liao Gailong, "Historical Experiences," part 1, p. 73.

[6] See Richard C. Kraus, Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

ground" (based on the class status of one's parents and grandparents), was usually entered into each person's confidential personnel file (dang'an ) and kept in the local unit office. As the assumptions underlying this classification became problematic upon "basic completion" of socialization of the means of production at the end of 1956, the files began to take on a life of their own.

The waging of class struggle was systematically linked with political struggle against targets selected to symbolize opposition to specific regime policies. Sometimes a national model would be chosen, and various localities would in turn discover their own exemplars, leading to the exposure of a "Gao Gang of Sichuan," a "Hu Feng of Guangdong," and so forth. This search-and-destroy operation was so effective at inhibiting visible deviation that it operated at a diminishing rate of return, as compliance made it increasingly difficult to locate valid targets. Reclassification of penitent class enemies after a stipulated probationary period (e.g., three years for a rich peasant, five for a landlord) seems to have resulted in a perceptible attrition over time of the target group, colloquially referred to as the "four-category elements" (landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, and bad elements).^[7]

In the wake of the Great Leap debacle, the regime began to use various mnemonic devices to evoke an opposition no longer physically present. One example is the "recall bitterness meal" (yi ku fan ), in which a basic unit (production brigade, school class, infantry platoon) would prepare a meal of the humble fare on which they had been forced to subsist before Liberation in order to remind themselves of how much their situation had improved. Richard Madsen describes such tableaux with considerable empathy:

These recitations of past bitterness would be clothed with solemn gestures to make them profoundly moving events. The sessions would be held at night, with almost all lights in the meeting hall extinguished to evoke the darkness of the past. Peasants who had suffered the most terrible personal degradations would ascend the stage to tell about their past. They would usually weep as they told their stories and sometimes they could not even finish their accounts.

[7] The data of the 1953 election indicate that the total number of those who had lost political rights due to bad class status amounted to 8.6 million, or 2.68 percent, of the 320 million total registered voters. The 1956 election data reveal that only 1.8 million citizens—0.6 percent of the registered voters—were denied the right to vote. If this figure is reliable, by 1956 a large number of former "class enemies" had managed to have their hats removed. Gongren Ribao , January 19, 1957; RR , September 26, 1956, and September 29, 1957; Zhengfa Yanjiu , 1957, pp. 6, 27–30; as cited in Richard Kraus, "Class Conflict and the Vocabulary of Social Analysis in China," CQ , no. 69 (March 1977): 54–74. See also Hong Yung Lee, "Changing Patterns of Political Participation in China: A Historical Perspective," unpublished paper presented at Workshop on Studies in Policy Implementation in the Post-Mao Era, Columbus, Ohio, June 20–24, 1983.

From the darkness people in the audience would punctuate the speaker's accounts of bitterness with shouted slogans: "Down with the old society! Down with the Kuomintang reactionaries! Down with the landlord class! Long live Chairman Mao!" In the small discussion groups, people would pour out their grief over the bitterness of the past, and express their deep-felt sorrow for their ingratitude to Chairman Mao. . . . At the end of the training sessions a special meal to remember the bitterness of the past would be held. The meal would consist of the bitter wild herbs which poor peasants often ate in the old days when they could not afford better food. Some of the old people actually wept as they ate the ate the bitter food.^[8]

As in the case of the salvationary mission, in its continuing assault upon the structure of feudal-capitalist authority the revolutionary leadership seems to have fallen victim to its own success. The prerevolutionary class structure dwindled upon being deprived of its economic base, and the most courageously forthright dissidents to the Party's policy initiatives (such as Liang Shuming or Hu Feng) were eliminated within the first decade. These developments implied that whereas the leadership had previously been preoccupied with the very real power of this structure of counterrevolution, henceforth they would have to devote increasing attention to shoring up the credibility of its existence. Meanwhile, the structure of socialist authority was becoming consolidated, and while it began with a generous endowment of popular legitimacy, this fund was soon depleted not only by the policy errors already alluded to but by its own inherent structural flaws.

Emergent Structure

In the modern Western constitutional democracy or Rechtsstaat , the structure of authority is "rational-legal"; that is, the citizenry confers obedience not to charismatic leaders but to a codified set of laws, which may be logically derived from a more general, basic law known as the Constitution. Modern (i.e., post-imperial) China has never had an effectively codified legal code, and in partial consequence the constitutions so hopefully drafted have remained politically spurious—well-intentioned statements of principles without practical effect.

There was some desire to rectify this situation after Liberation. After the CPPCC had been convened, it undertook the development of a nationwide legal system, promulgating the Land Reform Law and Marriage Law and a number of other laws. The first session of the NPC in September 1954 not only approved the PRC Constitution, it also passed regulations governing arrests and detentions and other rules related

to the first FYP.^[9] In the decade following promulgation of the Constitution more than eleven hundred laws and decrees were enacted to add to those statutes that had provided a loose framework for the administration of justice in the 1949–56 consolidation period.^[10]

Although these steps perhaps betokened a sincere commitment to the rule of law, legality was to make less headway in China than in any other state socialist system. The fact that upon assuming power the CPC abolished "all laws, decrees, and judicial systems" previously established is perhaps understandable given its cosmological conception of its mission, but doing so created a legal vacuum. Nor was any general codification of socialist law ever completed, although a number of beginnings were made. As a result, there was no possibility of appeal to various laws, customs, or traditions aginst the policies of the CPC or the will of its local functionaries. Although a number of laws were passed, their vague terminology left ample room for interpretation according to the whim of local Party leaders. Moreover, the regulations establishing the courts stipulated that "Where no [legal] provisions have been made, the policy of the Chinese People's Government shall be adhered to."^[11] Thus the People's Courts in practice became responsible for enforcing policies, directives, or regulations more often than laws, and these were commonly marked "provisional," sometimes even "for internal use only" (neibu ), thereby restricting access to cadres.^[12] From 1966 to 1976 the legislative function fell into desuetude (with no laws passed), and directives were issued in the name of a combination of central organs (in fact often simply by Mao himself).

The precise reasons for the stultification of "socialist legality" in China are too complex to detain us here. Continuing the revolution is in any case incompatible with commitment to a set of fixed principles or institutionalized procedures, for the exigencies of the movement are in constant flux. This is not necessarily to say that we are dealing with a regime of lawless terrorism or naked coercion (though these were also at hand). In contrast to the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, the CPC regime relied less on its secret police network than on its manipulation of social organization. Thus the structure of authority in the PRC came to

[9] Zhang Youyu, "Revolution and the Legal System: Written in Commemoration of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Chinese Communist Party," Minzhu yu Fazhi , no. 7 (July 25, 1981): 5–9.

[10] John Gardner, Chinese Politics and the Succession to Mao (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982), pp. 158–59.

[11] A. Doak Barnett, Communist China: The Early Years , 1949 –55 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964), pp. 32, 47, 50–51.

[12] Steven Mosher, Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese (New York: The Free Press, 1983), pp. 59–67.

consist not of law, not even of an hierarchical apparatus of coercion, but of the compartmentalization of society into consensually responsive groups .

First a word about the generation of this consensus, to be followed by a discussion of the structure of the groups. The content of the consensus was defined not by law but by Marxist-Leninist ideology. Yet the precise content of that ideology could not be determined by referring to the canon of sacred texts any more than the correct interpretation of Christianity can be determined by referring to the New Testament. The meaning of the classics remained subject to authoritative construal by the center, and inasmuch as the gates of revelation had not yet closed, from time to time the center could add to the canon by compiling selections from its ongoing stream of ideological commentaries and ideologically relevant policy directives. Thus a "rolling" consensus was generated to follow a sinuously undulating ideological "line" that continually redefined itself via the emission of doctrinal emendations, slogans, and polemics.

It has long been assumed by students of "totalitarianism" that its characteristic emphasis on mobilization entailed a corresponding "atomization" of social structure. In the vivid words of Hannah Arendt:

The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools. . . . The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.^[13]

Although Arendt was addressing herself not to totalitarian society but to the social breakdown that spawns it, subsequent theorists such as Fried-rich and Brzezinski not unnaturally inferred an interest of the new leadership in maintaining such atomization indefinitely: "every human being should, for best effect, have to face the monolith of totalitarian rule as an isolated 'atom.'"^[14] This atomization implies an absence of intermediary voluntary associations, kinship networks, or other organized groupings that might impede elite access to a mobilizable mass.^[15]

The Chinese experience, however, belies this theoretical prediction. It is true that pre-Liberation China suffered social disintegration, but due

[13] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973 ed.), pp. 308, also 315, 317, 323, et passim .

[14] Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 279.

[15] William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (New York: The Free Press, 1959), p. 33.

to the underlying strength of the family and kinship network, coherence seems to have been sustained at the primary group level, except perhaps in the coastal cities—not prominent after 1927 in the Communist ecology of success.^[16] And in the post-Liberation period, although certain reforms (such as Land Reform or the Marriage Law) had atomizing effects, the regime soon superseded the former and eased enforcement of the latter. After 1956, China began to crystallize into a social structure of much greater rigidity than that characterizing prerevolutionary Chinese society or that characterizing other state socialist societies—greater, indeed, than any society since medieval Europe.^[17] In a country that had previously witnessed vast population migrations there emerged a social structure honeycombed with walls—barriers to both vertical and horizontal mobility or communication. These barriers coincided with the boundaries of the "basic unit" (jiceng danwei ), the basic building block of the social structure. The Chinese aptly refer to these barriers as "frames" (kuangkuang ).

Why were these frames erected—particularly given the regime's concern with permanent mobilization? The leadership probably saw no contradiction: whereas ideological content might change with the vicissitudes of the historical dialectic, the organizational form could remain fixed. For the basic units were after all not autonomous, but corporately integrated into the centralized administrative network in such a way that they would ensure, not resist, "progressive" change. The leading organization theorists and custodians within the Party (such as Liu Shaoqi) had revolutionary backgrounds in conspiratorial base-building in the White areas, inclining them to emphasize a cellular pattern in which a clear distinction between units was expedient in order to prevent enemy counterintelligence agents from unraveling the entire network upon penetrating one cell. After half a century of social disintegration and national weakness, it also must have seemed appropriate to rebuild a sense of community, not based on the old conservative building blocks of the extended family, but on new ones in which socialist ideals of equality and mutual self-help would be implemented. Such an organizationally enforced solidarity offered the potential for "high levels of social solidarity and cooperation, crime control and social order, as well as a rapid re-

[16] See Roy Hofheinz, Jr., "The Ecology of Chinese Communist Success: Rural Influence Patterns, 1923–1945," in A. Doak Barnett, ed., Chinese Communist Politics in Action (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), pp. 3–78.

[17] In the Soviet Union, for example, there is only a rule against migration into the few largest cities (which is not that effectively enforced), not prohibitions affecting the entire urban hierarchy. Martin King Whyte and William L. Parish, Urban Life in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 21. See also Philip Short, The Dragon and the Bear (New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982), pp. 20, 75.

molding of the marriage customs, family patterns, fertility behavior, and other social and intellectual habits of the citizenry."^[18]

Of what did the unit consist? This varied: the unit might be a geographical district, such as a village or a city street; it could be an institutional, occupational, or other such group within the district—a factory, shop, school, company, government office, hospital, group of carpenters or butchers or writers or artists, even such catch-all assortments as "urban workers," or "agricultural laborers, poor and lower-middle peasants." In any case, every member of society was categorized into a unit. An individual could (and usually did) fall into several different categories—one based on employment, say, one on residence, a third on membership in a mass organization—but only one of these was likely to be "basic," and this was the unit of employment. Each unit was linked to the center through a pyramidal national structure that included a congress and an executive committee at each administrative-geographical level into which China was divided: district, county, special administrative district, special municipality, province, and autonomous region.

The basic unit became the functional substitute for the extended family, the crucial difference being that it was controlled from the center. It assumed the functions of the clan, educating the children, healing the sick, and paying a pension in old age. If a factory worker retired, his son would have first option to take his place. Like the clan, an incest taboo seemed to obtain—people would select mates within the same city or rural county, but not within the same unit. As in a clan, propitious marriages could enhance the unit. Military officers were known to hand-pick attractive young female recruits with a view to their marriageability, based on the notion of "reflected glory," a practice that resulted in a rather startling florescence of feminine beauty in military ambiance. Otherwise, "mixed" marriages—between peasant and worker, between peasant and educated youth—were so rare that if a college graduate married a peasant it warranted a celebratory notice in the local paper or even in People's Daily .

The basic unit controlled the dispensation of employment, welfare, ration tickets, and housing. So intensively did it regulate every facet of the lives of its members that post-Mao reform advocates referred to "unit ownership" (danwei suoyouzhi ).^[19] Workers were assigned to a unit upon completion of their schooling (usually a few days before graduation) under the presumption that they would remain there for life, and if

[18] Ibid., p. 26.

[19] The theme of "social bondage" (shehui shufu ) emerges prominently in recent Chinese fiction. See Xu Xuedong's "Transfer" [Diaodong ], for example, a long short story relating the difficulties of leaving a unit, or Jiang Xuan's "The Corner Forgotten by Love" (also made into a controversial movie).

they were fortunate their wives would be assigned to the same unit. One usually lived in a unit apartment, and in the more modern units, residences were all located in the same compound as the place of employment, making the unit self-contained. When watches and bicycles were in scarce supply one had to obtain permission from unit cadres to buy a bicycle or watch; when child-bearing became regulated for demographic reasons, "consultation" with unit cadres was required to conceive a child.

Whereas it is true that horizontal mobility was not restricted by a general ban on travel or by an internal passport requirement, as in Eastern Europe, a multistranded web of bureaucratic dependency more than made up for this apparent liberality. To obtain permission to travel outside the unit, a member had to ask unit authorities for a few days' leave from work for some concrete reason. If leave was granted, the traveler then had to obtain special ration coupons permitting purchase of rice or bread outside of the province (ration coupons were valid only in the home province). In order to find lodging at one's destination, the traveler must provide a letter of introduction from the home unit. Perhaps in part due to such bureaucratic constraints, the transportation infrastructure remained underdeveloped, with one of the most rudimentary road systems in the world. Permanent relocation from one part of the country was even more difficult, for in contrast to other state socialist systems there was no labor market in China, and assignment to work units was normaly irrevocable. In some cases reassignment could be obtained in order to reunite families in which husband and wife were assigned to geographically remote units, but protracted separations were also common, particularly among intellectuals. This became known as the "cowherd and weaving girl" (niulang zhinü ) problem, after the mythical separation of lovers who, through divine intervention, could meet once a year by crossing the river of stars over a magical bridge of flying birds. Some seasonal rural-urban migration was permitted to fill industrial labor shortages when they occurred, but the normatively approved direction of population flow was from urban to rural areas, in contrast to the usual pattern in developing countries, and usually contrary to the wishes of the participants.^[20]

One of the reasons frequently given for the emphasis on boundaries and unit integrity was the unit's security function. Thus, every block, factory, or compound erected high walls around itself (sometimes with

[20] See Ross Munro's series, "The Real China," Toronto Globe and Mail , October 8, 10, 11, 12, and 13, 1977. Also see Gail Henderson, "Danwei: The Chinese Work Unit" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1982), since published as Gail Henderson and Myron S. Cohen, The Chinese Hospital: A Socialist Work Unit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); and Yuichi Funabashi, Neibu: One Report on China (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun, Pub., 1982).

broken glass on top), curfew hours were instituted, armed guards posted, and so forth.^[21] Most Chinese carried an assortment of keys for various locks and padlocks; a bicycle, for example, was never left unlocked, even inside a unit. Ground floor windows, whether in city or countryside, usually had iron bars. This emphasis on security was perhaps conducive to unit solidarity, but it also fostered an attitude of indifference toward occurrences outside the unit, including national or international politics. Westerners acquainted with the low Chinese crime statistics found it difficult to reconcile the concern with security with any realistic threat. As a young British professional noted in his diary during a two-year teaching sojourn in Nanjing:

They genuinely are often quite ignorant about commonplace things in their own society outside their immediate experience. If one asks one's teachers about a fairly routine and mundane point about the administration, one generally gets a collection of different and vague replies. This means that amazing barriers must be surmounted when inter-unit communication is necessary. What would seem to be solvable by a simple phone call elsewhere requires lots of scratching of heads, top-level conferences, and "careful consideration." A more serious offshoot of this is the great wastage involved in the overduplication of jobs, . . . Waste in the millions of useless walls around housing estates, offices, everything. Not to keep out intruders, as it often ends up unfinished, but to assert the identity of a unit.^[22]

As suggested in this diary entry, the emphasis on unit self-containment informed the handling of information as well: only ideologically "correct" generalities were freely disseminated outside and among units, whereas more specific information was typically treated as "intelligence" and restricted to those authorized to receive it. The resulting information system was shaped like a star rather than a wheel, a vertically organized system lacking in lateral integration. Western travelers were struck by the paucity of plaques or signs to identify government buildings, not because their identity was confidential, but because information just did not circulate laterally. Much of what in the West is publicly available information, regularly shared with citizen and foreigner alike, was classified as restricted material (neibu ). Telephone books, maps, newspapers, and academic articles or books having no apparent connection with national security were regularly classified neibu .^[23] Telephone conversations were

[21] Ross Munro, October 10, pp. 1, 23.

[22] From the China diaries of a young British professional and former member of the Sino-British People's Friendship Association who taught English in Nanjing under the terms of the exchange from January 1975 to February 1977, and graciously permitted me to peruse and to quote from them. (Hereinafter "Diaries.")

[23] Peter Van Ness, "Black, White and Grey in China Research," Far Eastern Economic Review (hereinafter FEER ) 123, no. 6 (February 9, 1984): 30–31.

widely suspected to be at least selectively tapped, and there must have been a fairly elaborate recording system in the offices and residences of central leaders, to judge from the copious use of verbatim quotations when they later fell victim to criticism. Public security inspected the mail flowing inside and outside the country with some thoroughness; domestic mail was probably monitored less systematically, though the provision in the 1982 State Constitution restricting such activity to public security forces gives rise to the suspicion that domestic mails must have come under the surveillance of the unit leadership.

But the most pervasive and meaningful form of unit control over information was the file (dang'an ) system: in a sealed envelope in the personnel section of every unit there was a confidential dossier for every employee, containing not only the normal elements of a biography but any confessions or self-criticisms or political charges made by informers in the past and the Party's summary evaluation of the individual, including a genealogy of the person's class background for the past three generations. The individual had no access to the file; only authorized cadres knew its contents.^[24] The reasons for this cult of secrecy can only be surmised, but it is worth bearing in mind that the CPC was born in a threatening milieu in which secrecy was conducive to survival, and that the engineering approach in particular was perfected in enemy-occupied areas.

Naturally, the ambit of the public sector, a realm that in the West mediates between political authority and individual (or family) privacy,^[25] was constrained by such considerations. Library borrowing was hedged by numerous discouraging restrictions: a person asking for a particular book must bring a letter certifying his (or her) need for it.^[26] At most university libraries, foreign language periodicals, dictionaries, and encyclopedias were kept in reference rooms reserved for teachers and graduate students, access again being contingent upon possessing a certificate proving that one's vocation required it.^[27] There was no official prepublication censorship, as in the Soviet Union, but authors (and sometimes editors) were responsible for their publications and liable to purge or public criticism if their selections were deemed politically unsuitable; books might also be withdrawn from circulation at the slightest change in official tastes. Some newspapers (e.g., China DailyPeking Review ) were designated for

[24] Ross Munro, October 10, pp. 2–3; October 8, pp. 1–2.

[25] See Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandlung der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1962).

[26] Jay Mathews and Linda Mathews, One Billion: A China Chronicle (New York: Random House, 1983), p. 291.

[27] Fox Butterfield, China: Alive in the Bitter Sea (New York: Times Books, Quadrangle Publications, 1982), pp. 360–94.

international circulation, some (e.g., People' Daily , Red Flag ) for national and international circulation, some (e.g., People's Liberation Army Daily , most local newspapers) restricted to national circulation, some (e.g., Cankao Xiaoxi ) restricted to circulation among officials, some (e.g., Cankao Ziliao ) restricted to circulation among high officials. The distribution of information within the bureaucracy was similarly multitiered, and the power of a given official might be gauged by "political access" to the document stream within the hierarchy^[28] —thus one of Zhang Chunqiao's "crimes," for example, would be to give his wife (a lower-ranking cadre) access to higher-level documents.

The "neo-feudal" horizontal segmentation of society by unit frames and the secretion or vertical channeling of information (and free flow of propaganda) gave rise to the impression that there were "two worlds." As every member of a unit learned, there was "a distinction between inner and outer" (nei wai you bie ), meaning that dirty linen should not be washed in public. Language itself became bifurcated: the heroic public language was used to satisfy ever more probing demands for evidence of thought reform, whereas the private language preserved the traditional norms that keep friendship and kinship ties alive. The two discourses were kept apart as a result of conflicting social demands, but each could be used in its appropriate context.^[29] Whereas this disjunction between public and private may to some degree echo traditional patterns of communication and association, the impression of my informants is that under the CPC it became noticeably sharper, more strictly enforced, thereby giving rise to a general evacuation of the public realm.

There were also numerous impediments to vertical communication and mobility, encompassing not only the declining prospects for upward promotion as Party recruitment dwindled at the end of the 1950s and higher positions were monopolized by veteran officials on the basis of seniority and retained indefinitely,^[30] but the general phenomenon of

[28] Oksenberg, "Methods of Communication."

[29] Helmut Opletal, "Four Observations on Chinese Mass Media," The Asian Messenger 2, no. 3/3, no. 1 (Autumn/Winter 1977): 38–40; also Opletal, Die Informationspolitik der Volksrepublik China: Von der "Kulturrevolution " bis zum Sturz der "Viererbande " (1965 bis 1976 ) (Bochum: Studienverlag Brockmeyer, 1981). The author, an Austrian student, studied at Beijing University and the Beijing Language Institute from 1973 to 1975, returning for further visits in 1976 and 1977. See also Helmut Martin, "Sprachpolitik," in Brunhild Staiger, ed., China (Tübingen: Horst Erdmann, 1980), pp. 392–407.

[30] Though it sounds rather sweeping to say that the avenues of upward mobility were becoming constricted by the late 1950s, a wide range of evidence may be cited in support of such a generalization. At the highest level, see Franklin Houn, "The Eighth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party," American Political Science Review , June 1957, pp. 392–404. For two studies of lower-level bureaucratic staffing, one in a rural, the other in an urban context, which confirm a sharp decline of vertical mobility after 1957, see Michel Oksenberg, "Local Leaders in Rural China, 1962–65: Individual Attributes,Bureaucratic Positions, and Political Recruitment," pp. 155–216; and Yingmao Kau, "The Urban Bureaucratic Elite in Communist China: A Case Study of Wuhan, 1949–65," pp. 216–71, both in A. Doak Barnett, ed., Chinese Communist Politics in Action (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969). On Party admission, see Roberta Martin, Party Recruitment in China: Patterns and Prospects (New York: Columbia University, East Asian Institute Occasional Papers, 1981). Martin finds that after the most rapid growth period in Party history, from 1945 to 1956 (about an 886 percent increase) and another big increase in the 1956–57 period, there was a lull. The period from 1961 to 1969 witnessed an increase of only 3 million (from 17 to 20 million).

"bureaucratism" (guanliaozhuyi ). This refers to those cadre behavior patterns, whose exact identity and nature has been a matter of periodic discussion and redefinition, which give rise to estrangement between elites and masses. Political estrangement consists partly of an asymmetrical communication flow (you talk, we listen; we talk, you don't listen), partly of Ressentiment aroused by cadre privilege (tequan ). Bureaucratism was regularly dissected but usually attributed to the moral deficiencies of individual officials rather than to the organization itself, illustrating one of the chief differences between Chinese and Western theories of organization. Nevertheless, a number of structural features probably contributed to increasing "bureaucratism" during this period.

In 1956 a cadre rank system was established, consisting of a twenty-six-grade scale.^[31] The major divisions fell at grades seven, thirteen, and seventeen: grades eighteen to twenty-six included the vast lower echelons of state employees or "national cadres" (guojia ganbu ); grades fourteen to seventeen were considered middle-ranking cadres and assigned to positions of leadership at the commune and county levels; while those in grades eight to thirteen were high-ranking cadres (gaoji ganbu ), usually prefectural or provincial officials or department heads in Beijing. Highest were those ranking grade seven and above—chairman of the CPC, chief of state, chairman of the NPC, premier of the State Council, down to government ministers, CC members, provincial first Party secretaries, and Military Region commanders. Other professions boasted different grade numbers: five for technicians, sixteen for actors, eight for workers in state enterprises, twelve for academics, even four for cooks. An individual's standing in this elaborate hierarchy determined not only monthly pay but how many square feet of housing one might be assigned, whether one traveled by car or bicycle, which schools one's children attended, and whether one had access to foreign films and literature. According to the regulations of the State Council governing transportation, for example, cadres of grade thirteen and above had use of a limousine to commute to

[31] See Ezra F. Vogel, "From Revolutionary to Semi-Bureaucrat: The 'Regularization' of Cadres," CQ , no. 29 (January-March 1967): 36–60; Martin King Whyte, "Bureaucracy and Modernization in China: The Maoist Critique," American Sociological Review , no. 38 (1973): 149–63; and Harding, Organizing China , pp. 1–32, et passim .

their ministries, cadres of grades fourteen to seventeen might travel by car when necessary to conduct state business, whereas cadres in grades eighteen and below received no transportation provisions. High rank gained access to special flights on Trident jetliners housed on the military airfield in Western Beijing, or to the medical expertise and equipment of Beijing Hospital (a resticted facility). Even the availability of telephones and bathtubs was dictated by political position: only department chiefs and agency heads normally rated either a phone or a tub at home—others must use the public telephone and neighborhood bathhouses.^[32]

From a macro-sociological perspective, cadre privilege soon became the most salient exception to general egalitarian tendencies in Chinese society. It was not advertised, of course, but the sheer growth of Chinese officialdom made it difficult to conceal. In 1949, the Party could claim only seven hundred twenty thousand qualified cadres, a figure deemed sufficient to cover only about a third of the posts vacant; 3 million cadres were thus recruited between October 1949 and September 1952. Party membership grew from 4,488,000 in 1949 to 17 million by 1961 (only 20 percent of whom had joined before 1949). The bureaucracy was clearly a growth sector of the economy, dwarfing even industry: in Shanghai, where total employment between 1949 and 1957 increased by 1.2 percent per year, and factory workers and staff grew by 5.8 percent annually, health and government workers increased by an annual rate of 16 percent.^[33] By 1955, government cadres were consuming 9.6 percent of the national budget, nearly double the figure originally planned (5 percent).^[34] Whereas bureaucrats controlled less than 10 percent of China's gross national product before 1949, by 1972 this figure had risen to 30 percent.^[35]

The stratified distribution of privileges made it difficult to sustain the myth of "unequal role, equal status." The hierarchical distribution of rank and perquisites, and the use of the dossier system to supplement seniority as a basis for promotion, meant that young cadres were systematically oriented toward ingratiating their superiors rather than to-

[32] Mathews and Mathews, One Billion , p. 200; Mosher, Broken Earth , pp. 59–67. The ranking of cadres also decides the length of their "tails," meaning the number of service personnel and assistants they can have. High-ranking cardes can have drivers, cooks, nurses, doctors, and the right to use vacation resorts provided by the state. If they should be purged and imprisoned, rank will in most cases continue to determine their meal allowance and treatment. Thus Jiang Qing, for example, was said to be eating very well after her arrest and imprisonment. See Bernstein, Center , pp. 131–40.

[33] Kraus, Class Conflict , p. 6.

[34] Gordon White, "The Post-revolutionary Chinese State," in Victor Nee and David Mozingo, eds., State and Society in Contemporary China (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 30–31.

[35] Kraus, Class Conflict , p. 6.

ward cultivating their subordinates.^[36] If they succeeded in doing so, they could look forward to a life of security and gradually increasing income, consumption, power, and status. As official behavior thus became systematically reinforced, cadre motives became suspect even when their conduct was unexceptionable—were they dedicated to service to the people, or to their own careers? The former became a form of public rhetoric that referred to a collective abstraction (the whole people, not you people) or to the future (not now, later). Monopolizing the distribution of workpoints, bonuses, good job assignments, and other postitive incentives, retaining exclusive right "correctly" to interpret higher directives or slogans, cadres could rule rather high-handedly without much fear of retribution as long as they fulfilled the demands of their superiors, and their subordinates had "no exit." Authority, which according to "mass line" conceptions should follow a circular flow, became "transitive." After 1956, the elite-mass distinction thus began to displace "class struggle" as the dominant operational contradiction in Chinese society.

The Critique of Structure

We have been reviewing two concurrent developments that took place during the first decade of CPC rule: destruction of the remaining vestiges of the pre-Liberation authority structure, and construction of a new, socialist structure. Both were positively evaluated at the time, but they also had their adverse features. The former threatened to eliminate one of the functional requisites of continuing revolution, as well as a convenient scapegoat; the latter introduced the novel possibility to these old revolutionaries of becoming targets of a new revolution. Both of these developments drew to a climax in the brief period from the Eighth Party Congress in 1956 to the wilting of the Hundred Flowers in the spring of 1957, leading Mao to rethink the theory of continuing revolution. What resulted was the theoretical reorientation that would guide him during the last two decades of his life.

Declining Relevance of Class

The Eighth Congress was held, among other things, to celebrate essential completion of socialization of the means of production. This momentous achievement enhanced the prestige of the Party leadership, but at the same time it divested both landlords and bourgeoisie of their economic base and eliminated visible class differences, threatening in the long run

[36] Whyte and Parish, Urban Life , p. 363.

to deprive the Party of its core constituency. The very reality of classes came into question as several members of the leadership went on record forecasting the imminent extinction of class struggle.^[37] The dominant contradiction in the emerging society would be the contradiction between relatively advanced relations of production and underdeveloped forces of production rather than class struggle, and this form of contradiction could be resolved without violent social conflict. To continue to mobilize remnants of cashiered classes against one another on the basis of recollected injury when the possibility of economic exploitation had been eliminated could only damage the (generally high) productivity of the erstwhile exploiting classes, delay their integration into society, and disrupt economic growth and tranquillity.

We have seen that Mao did not hesitate to censure his colleaques when he differed with them, but at this point he seemed to be in agreement, as borne out in contemporaneous remarks revealed after his death.^[38] To be sure, the "basic resolution" of class contradictions did not attenuate his conviction that social conflict was the motor of social progress, but he began to redefine that conflict more optimistically. Thus he shifted increasingly from the focus on classes to the more inclusive concept of "the people" that he had introduced in the United Front doctrines that provided the underpinnings of New Democracy. This supra-class grouping, aggregated on the basis not of its relationship to the means of production but of its opposition to Japan, was essentially benign; though contradictions still existed, they could be allowed to play themselves out without Party interference.

Ironically, however, whereas the waning of classes was inclining his colleagues to repudiate storm tactics and to commit themselves to the more thorough engineering of national reconstruction, the same phenomenon disposed Mao to question the continued pertinence of the engineering approach. As he put it in his defense of the 1955–56 "high tide":

Sudden change is the most basic law of the universe. . . . We communists hope for the transformation of things in general. The leap forward is different from

[37] Thus Liu Shaoqi allegedly remarked that the primary contradiction was not class struggle but "between the advanced socialist system and the backward productive forces," and Deng Xiaoping noted that the old system of class labels "has lost or is losing its original significance." RR , September 26, 1956, as cited in Kraus, "Class Conflict."

[38] In a letter written to Huang Yanpei on December 4, 1956, Mao stated: "In our country, class contradictions basically have been resolved. (That is to say, they have yet to be completely resolved, and ideological contradictions will continue to exist for a long time to come.)," in "Twenty-three Letters by Comrade Mao Zedong, from the 'Selection of Mao's. Letters,'" RR , December 25, 1983, pp. 1–4.

the past. . . . The destruction of balance is a leap forward and is better than balance; imbalance and the causing of trouble are good things. . . . Balance, quantitative change and unity are temporary and relative, while imbalance, sudden change and disunity are absolute and endless.^[39]

While conceding that "the denial of quantitative change can lead to adventurism," Mao differentiated his notion of "wavelike advance" from adventurism by stressing that periods of consolidation were necessary, that "there cannot be a high tide every day."^[40] He nonetheless implicitly rejected the idea that social change could be tightly controlled or directed from above. Only through the free interplay of social forces, through the development and resolution of contradictions in society, could continued revolution be successfully promoted. It would be going too far to say that this precluded any active role for the Party in directing the continuing revolution, but Mao was aware that the Party's concern for organizational control made it a reluctant participant in such a process. Thus he exerted all his persuasive skills to try to raise the Party's tolerance of "chaos": "If disorder results it won't be all that great, there will just be a spell of disorder and then things may well move toward order," he said at Chengdu (March 20, 1958). "The appearance of disorder contains within it some favorable elements, we should not fear disorder."^[41]

Contradictions among the People

In this open, experimental frame of mind, Mao utilized the Hundred Flowers as an occasion, not necessarily to spur the revolution onward, but to take its temperature. Thus he interceded at the beginning of 1957 in the process of controlled liberalization that had been under way since early 1956 under the aegis of Zhou Enlai, giving a four-hour extemporaneous talk on February 27 at an expanded Supreme State Conference (later to be published in revised form as "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People"). He also convened a Beijing forum on literature, philosophy, and education on February 16 at which he gave another talk; he spoke to the National Conference on Propaganda Work on March 6–10; and he made a tour of Tianjin (March 17), Ji'nan (March 18), Nanjing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou (March 20), giving speeches at each

[39] Wansui (1969), p. 213.

[40] Mao Zedong Sixiang Wansui (Hong Kong: n.p., 1967) (hereinafter Wansui [1967a]), p. 59.

[41] Starr, Continuing the Revolution , pp. 306 et passim . See also Starr, "Conceptual Foundations," pp. 610–28; Young and Woodward, "Contradictions," pp. 912–34; and Schram, "Mao Tse-tung," pp. 221–45.

stop.^[42] His message was that people should discard their previous inhibitions and speak out more freely. Noting the recent occurrence of strikes in China,^[43] Mao seems to have wanted to preempt an explosion of the sort that had just transpired in Poland and Hungary by permitting some of the accumulated pressure to dissipate: "If one persists in using methods of terror in solving internal contradictions, it may lead to transformations of these contradictions into antagonistic contradictions as happened in Hungary," he warned, claiming that "certain people" even hoped this would happen, that "thousands of people would demonstrate in the street against the People's Government." With characteristic bravado, he scorned any such possibility: "If a handful of school children can topple our party, government and army by a show of force, we must all be fatheads. Therefore, don't be afraid of great democracy. If there is a disturbance, it will help get the festering sore cured, and that's a good thing."^[44] Having dismissed the possibility that any unpleasant surprises would occur, Mao invited regime critics to do their worst:

In my opinion, whoever wants to make trouble may do so for as long as he pleases, and if one month is not enough, he may go on for two; in short, the matter should not be wound up until he feels he has had enough. . . . Don't always try to keep a lid on everything. Whenever people utter queer remarks, go on strike or present a petition, you try to beat them back with one blow, always thinking that these things ought not to occur. Why is it then that these things that ought not to occur still do?^[45]

If cadres should not repress heterodox "remarks," how then should they respond? Anticipating the advice he would give them at the outset of the Cultural Revolution a decade later, Mao urged them to be tolerant to the point of self-immolation:

It's certainly not easy for a person to set fire to burn himself. I've heard that around this area there were some people who had second thoughts and didn't set a big fire. . . . Let those poisonous weeds grow up; let those freaks and monsters come out! Why be afraid of them? At the time we said not to be

[42] An original version of the February speech leaked out via the Warsaw Embassy and was published by Sydney Gruson in New York Times , June 13, 1957, pp. 1, 8 (hereinafter NYT ). For a detailed chronology of Mao's activities during this period (and indeed all the top Chinese leaders), see Roderick MacFarquhar, Origins , 1 , pp. 177–253; see also Li Wupeng in ZM , no. 18 (April 1979): 20–31.

[43] See T. J. Hughes and D. E. T. Luard, The Economic Development of Communist China , 1949 –1958 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 52–56; and Charles Hoffmann, The Chinese Worker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), pp. 146–47, for statistics indicating the magnitude of the 1956–57 strikes.

[44] Mao, "Talks at a Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal, and Autonomous Region Party Committees: Talk of January 18" (1957), in SW , vol. 5: 358.

[45] Mao, "Talks at a Conference of Secretaries . . . Talk of January 27," ibid., p. 374.

afraid, but within our Party there were some comrades, like XXX and others, who were loyal and faithful to the Party and the nation, but simply feared there would be chaos everywhere. . . . From now on, in my opinion, there should be a fire within no more than three years, and again within five years.^[46]

The primary significance of the Hundred Flowers movement is that for the first time since 1949 there was an attempt to define the structure against which the revolution should be animated in terms of emergent cleavages in socialist society rather than as a mnemonic reconstruction of pre-Liberation structures. From the analogy he drew between strikes in China and the Hungarian uprising, and from his images of lifting "lids," testing cadres through "inoculations," "blast furnaces," and the like, we may infer that Mao sensed the vulnerability of the emergent socialist structure, and foresaw that at least parts of it might very well come under popular criticism. He indicated in his writings and conversations at the time, of which we have a quite voluminous record, that he expected "bureaucratism" to come under fire, for example—indeed, he seemed to be inviting such an attack. He had apparently not anticipated that the basic socialist political framework might come under assault,^[47] and this perhaps accounts for his willingness so promptly to reverse himself and signal the launching of the Anti-Rightist movement to root out all the "weeds" that had "bloomed."

Yet it is at the same time interesting and characteristic that Mao, in the face of an estimated 90 percent cadre opposition,^[48] should attempt to mobilize a dubious and reluctant mass constituency to express apparently spontaneous political opinions. This rather daring opening, which was also to characterize Mao's approach to the Cultural Revolution ten years later, marked a clear departure from the engineering paradigm. Any attempt to conceive of it as a sophisticated political ploy, a trap designed to provide justification for a purge, must yield to Occam's razor: in Mao's position he could have doubtless arranged a purge more parsimoniously

[46] Mao, "Zai zui gao guowuhuiyi shang de jieshu hua" [Concluding remarks at a supreme state conference] (March 1, 1957), in Wansui (1969), pp. 90–100.

[47] E.g., Zhang Bojun proposed again that the CPPCC become the second house of a bicameral parliament and suggested that, as an interim measure, representatives of the NPC, the CPPCC, the CPC, the Bourgeois Democratic Parties, and the mass organizations form a "political design department" to discuss all major policies and programs. For many intellectuals and bourgeois democratic notables, the solution was to eliminate the "absolute leadership of the Party," to allow for a free press "even if it means opposition to the Communist Party," and to permit democratic parties to attempt to control the government through democratic elections—in short, liberal democracy. See Harding, Organizing China , pp. 147–48.

[48] See Richard Solomon, "One Party and 'One Hundred Schools': Leadership, Lethargy, or Luan?" Current Scene 7, nos. 19–20 (October 1, 1969): 25–26.

(as in, say, the Gao-Rao case). It is worth making a brief excursus at this point to try to discover what Mao thought he was doing.

Revolution Migrates to the Superstructure

Mao was at this juncture evolving a new perspective on the dynamics of continuing revolution that would take into account the post-Liberation developments discussed above. From the socialization of the means of production he inferred that if class could no longer be an empirically meaningful criterion for locating the target structure of revolution, he would find one elsewhere, for he was convinced that conflict was eternal and that the revolution must continue. From the Hundred Flowers episode he inferred that repression was not a viable way of dealing with counterrevolutionary forces that challenged the emergent structure of socialist authority; somehow "old revolutionaries" must find a way to join with and encourage such forces, for otherwise they risked betraying the revolution. From the failure of the Great Leap Forward, and from the Peng Dehuai episode in which Peng sought to blame Mao for that failure, he drew more pessimistic conclusions about the future of socialism than he (or his colleagues) had entertained for several years: not only would class struggle continue, there was a real prospect that the class enemy would prevail, with the help of "revisionist" elements within the Party, leading to a reversal of historical evolution backward along the "capitalist road."

The challenge for Mao was to find some basis for this new theory, given that socialization of the means of production was hardly a panacea—both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia had after all undergone that transformation, only to become teachers by negative example. Here Mao turned to the relations of production and the ideological superstructure, tending to disregard the economic basis of ideas—all the more so after the Great Leap's failure demonstrated his fallibility in the field of economics. Developments in the relations of production and cultural superstructure were relatively autonomous and would have to be approached on their own terms without clear guidelines from the economic base. As Mao now saw it, the Russian and Chinese revolutions demonstrated that the transformation of the old relations of production was not contingent upon the existence of fully developed new forces of production. In fact, if one placed the seizure of power, solving the ownership problem and developing the forces of production in this order, then the development of the forces of production always came after the change in the relations of production: "You must first change the relations of production in order to make it possible fully to develop the forces of production," Mao wrote in 1960. "This is a universal law."^[49] Mao's real concern was persistently

[49] Wansui (1967a), p. 213.

to push the relations of production toward public ownership, which would in turn promote the forces of production. If "contradictions" arose because bourgeois thinking intervened, it would be necessary to launch class struggles in the superstructure to remove such obstacles.^[50]

Thus after the Leap, Mao abandoned the inclusive concept of "people" and reverted to class, calling for "protracted and fierce class struggle." This reversion was occasioned partly by the emergence of what he considered class enemies, partly by Mao's need for class struggle as a political engine to propel further transformations of the relations of production. In view of the fact that classes could no longer be defined on the basis of their relationship to the means of production in the socialist period, a call for class struggle however begged many questions. Should class be determined by current occupational status (geren chengfen ), by family background (jiating chushen ), or by political attitudes? China's old and new middle classes preferred the first criterion, which would have exculpated them, but they had little influence. China's political and military bureaucrats preferred the criterion of family background, both because of its administrative convenience and because it sanctioned their elite status unto the third and fourth generations—and they had the clout to prevail throughout much of this period.^[51] After 1958, Mao, however, increasingly favored political attitude as a criterion of class, which could be defined on the basis of current behavior rather than an objective stigma recorded in some dossier. It was on this basis that Mao once referred to those who obstructed his efforts as a "bureaucratic class."^[52]

Which attitude? Obviously, "pro-Mao" was one important factor, lending attitudinal criteria the irremediable subjectivism that would ultimately redound in the factionalism of the Cultural Revolution. But Mao had something more specific in mind. The key attitude to which he turned as a defining criterion of class was selfishness . Proletarian virtue,

[50] Cheng Yang, "Socialism and the Quest for Modernization," pp. 74 ff.

[51] Kraus, Class Conflict , pp. 9, 97, et passim . See also Stuart Schram, "Classes, Old and New, in Mao Zedong's Thought, 1949–1976," in James L. Watson, ed., Class and Social Stratification in Post-Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 29–56.

[52] In 1965 he said: "The bureaucratic class is a class sharply opposed to the working class and the poor and lower-middle peasants. These people have become or are in the process of becoming bourgeois elements sucking the blood of the workers. How can they have proper understanding?" Mao, "Dui Chen Zhengren tongzhi dundian baogao de pishi" [Comments on comrade Chen Zhengren's report on his stay on a spot] (January 29, 1965), in Mao Zedong Sixiang Wansui (Hong Kong: n.p., April 1967) (hereinafter Wansui [1967b]), p. 31. In his conversation with Malraux the same year, Mao derogated Khrushchev: "I know his theory; you begin by no longer tolerating criticism, then you abandon self-criticism, then you cut yourself off from the masses, and since the Party can draw its revolutionary strength only from them, you tolerate the formation of a new class." André Malraux, Anti-Memoirs , pp. 369–70.

according to Mao, was to "destroy the selfish and establish the unselfish." This critique of selfishness, deeply resonant of Chinese cultural tradition, also dovetailed well with popular resentment of some of the emergent socialist contradictions described in the previous subsection. Inequality, privilege, could be clearly derived from selfish motives; less obviously, perhaps, the desire for autonomy of the professional or intellectual, the isolation of the official from the masses, were arguably "selfish." The possible ramifications were countless.

The attitude of selfishness in turn could be traced to the emotion of fear . One refused to share, of one's self or one's time or resources, because of a fear of loss. Mao referred to such anxieties in explicitly therapeutic terms as "encumbrances," mental "baggage," and so forth:

"To get rid of the baggage" means to free our minds of many encumbrances. Many things may become baggage, may become encumbrances, if we cling to them blindly and uncritically. . . . Thus, a prerequisite for maintaining close links with the masses and making fewer mistakes is to examine one's baggage, to get rid of it and so to emancipate the mind.^[53]

Mao's works are replete with testimonials to the crippling effects of fear on the Chinese people. "What should we not fear? We should not fear heaven. We should not fear ghosts. We should not fear dead people. We should not fear the bureaucrats. We should not fear the warlords. We should not fear the capitalists."^[54] Nearly half a century later, Mao made another listing of things not to be feared, the so-called "five-fear-nots" (wu bu pa ): A Communist should fear "neither removal from his post, expulsion from the Party, divorce, imprisonment, nor beheading"—words Wang Hongwen would recall in his speech to the Tenth Party Congress in 1973.^[55] In his 1955 "women with bound feet" rebuke, fear was once again at issue: "Too much carping, unwarranted complaints, boundless anxiety and countless taboos —all this they take as the right policy in the rural areas."^[56]

In a fugitive party in which leadership entailed regularly exhorting people to risk life and limb, coping with fear was not an unfamiliar problem. The standard approach was an allopathic form of therapy in which the patient's anxiety would be assuaged by reassurances of support, minimization of the objective danger, and so forth. This was first

[53] Mao, "Get Rid of the Baggage and Start the Machinery" (April 12, 1944), in Readings , p. 306.

[54] Mao, "Toward a New Golden Age" (July 1919), in Stuart Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York: Praeger, 1963), pp. 105–6.

[55] Statement of 1958, quoted in Yan Jingwen, Zhou Enlai Pingzhuan [Critical biography of Zhou Enlai] (Hong Kong: Bowen Shudian, 1974), p. 28.

[56] Mao, "On the Cooperative Transformation of Agriculture" (July 31, 1955), in SW , vol. 5: 184.

explicitly endorsed in Liu Shaoqi's seminal work, "On the Cultivation of Communist Party Cadres" (usually translated as "How to Be a Good Communist"),^[57] and will hence be christened "cultivation therapy"—although strictly speaking, "cultivation" refers to self-disciplinary techniques rather than to interpersonal ministration. Three years following the appearance of Liu's essay, Mao also endorsed this approach:

So long as a person who has made mistakes does not hide his sickness for fear of treatment or persist in his mistakes until he is beyond cure, so long as he honestly and sincerely wishes to be cured and to mend his ways, we should welcome and cure his sickness so that he can mend his ways and become a good comrade.^[58]

Again, in a speech given immediately prior to the launching of the Hundred Flowers, Mao said:

We must oppose the method of "finishing people off with a single blow." This remolding of the intellectuals, especially the changing of their world outlook, is a process that requires a long period of time. Our comrades must understand that ideological remolding involves a long-term, patient and painstaking work, and they must not attempt to change people's ideology, which has been shaped over decades of life, by giving a few lectures or by holding a few meetings. Persuasion, not compulsion, is the only way to convince them.^[59]

Even on those occasions better remembered for his more provocative remarks, Mao reaffirmed his commitment to "cultivation therapy"—witness this passage from his speech to the Tenth Plenum in 1962, better known for his warning of the continued pertinence of class struggle:

As to how the Party should deal with the problem of revisionism and the problem of a bourgeoisie within itself, I think we should adhere to our traditional policy. No matter what errors a comrade may commit, . . . if he should change himself earnestly, we should welcome him and rally with him. . . . We permit the commission of errors. Since you have erred, we also allow you to rectify them.^[60]

Due perhaps in part to its congruence with deeply rooted cultural patterns, cultivation therapy became the consensually endorsed form of "rectification" and was institutionalized in the form of "criticism and

[57] Liu Shaoqi, "Lun gongchandangyuan de xiuyang" [On the self-cultivation of Chinese Communist Party members] (Yan'an, July 8, 1939), translated as "How to Be a Good Communist," in Collected Works of Liu Shao-ch'i (Hong Kong: Union Research Institute, 1969), vol. 1: 151–219.

[58] Mao, "Rectify the Party's Style of Work" (February 1, 1942), in SW , vol. 3: 50.

[59] Mao, "Speech at the CCP's National Conference on Propaganda Work" (March 19, 1957), in Readings , pp. 493–94.

[60] Mao, "Speech at the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee," as translated in Chinese Law and Government 1, no. 4 (Winter 1968–69): p. 91.

self-criticism" and "study" (xuexi ) meetings, which were (and still are) held routinely among members of Party branches, work units, and other "small groups" (xiaozu ). The intensity of such sessions varied according to the magnitude of the error and the overall political climate. In the most intense, members of the group might be completely isolated from their environment, families, and friends for a matter of months and segregated into study groups dedicated exclusively to the reform of their thought. The more difficult cases might be ostracized and obliged to write repeated self-criticisms before one was accepted.^[61] In its more routine form, members of the group disperse and interact in an occupational or residential context between sessions and are permitted to maintain contact with a normal circle of friends and relatives.^[62]

Although it is true that Mao endorsed cultivation therapy, in this new context in which the emergent authority structure itself might be fundamentally disoriented, the group consensus upon which cultivation therapy rests could not be relied upon. In the face of hardening socialist "frames," which admittedly were an improvement upon pre-Liberation structural weaknesses and yet still seemed to stultify revolutionary momentum, Mao needed a new and more drastic approach, one that would permit a dramatic breakthrough from conventional inhibitions. To find it, he reached back into his own formative experience, even antedating his admission to the CPC (the Marxist classics, after all, have little to say about the management of emotions). From his youthful confrontations with his father, as he subsequently recollected for Edgar Snow, he learned that if an authority is frontally defied he will usually relent, whereas "when I remained meek and submissive, he only cursed and beat me the more."^[63] In Mao's first published article, a discussion of physical culture, he claimed that:

To wash our feet in ice water makes us acquire courage and dauntlessness, as well as audacity. . . . In order to progress in exercise, one must be savage. If one is savage, one will have great vigor and strong muscles and bones. The method of exercise should be rude, then one can apply oneself seriously and it will be easy to exercise.^[64]

More importantly, it would free the patient from a crippling attachment

[61] Cf. Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing " in China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963).

[62] Martin King Whyte, Small Groups and Political Rituals in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).

[63] Edgar Snow, Red Star over China (New York: Grove Press, 1968, rev. and enlarged ed.), p. 168.

[64] Mao, "A Study of Physical Education" (April 1917), in Schram, Political Thought , pp. 94–102.

to "self" and permit greater dedication to altruistic endeavors. In another autobiographical passage, from his important 1942 speech at the Yan'an Forum on Art and Literature, in which he urged China's intellectuals to dedicate themselves more selflessly to the masses, Mao revealed that he had been able to undergo a conversion only by boldly confronting his own fear of defilement:

I began life as a student and at school acquired the ways of a student. I then used to feel it undignified to do even a little manual labor, such as carrying my own luggage in the presence of my fellow students, who were incapable of carrying anything, either on their shoulders or in their hands. At that time I felt that intellectuals were the only clean people in the world, while in comparison workers and peasants were dirty. But after I became a revolutionary and lived with workers and with soldiers of the revolutionary army, I gradually came to know them well, and they gradually came to know me well too. It was then, and only then, that I fundamentally changed the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois feelings implanted in me in the bourgeois schools. I came to feel that compared with the workers and peasants, the unremolded intellectuals were not clean and that, in the last analysis, the workers and peasants were the cleanest people and, even though their hands were soiled and their feet smeared with cow dung, they were really cleaner than the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals. This is what is meant by a change in feelings, a change from one class to another.^[65]

The "change from one class to another" that Mao discusses here had nothing to do with the relations of production. It involved rather a "change in feelings" from the fear of "dirt" (which Mao seemed to associate with workers and peasants) to admiration and respect for those who were "dirty" through direct contact with the object of fear.

Mao had introduced (or revived?—his mother was a devout Buddhist) a therapeutic technique that was not "long-term, patient and painstaking," but abrupt; not gentle, but "rough," even jarring. A classic exposition of what we might call "shock therapy" may be found in his article, "Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing" (February 8, 1942): "The first thing to do in the reasoning process is to give the patient a good shakeup by shouting at him, 'You are ill!' so as to administer a shock and make him break out in a sweat, and then to give him sincere advice on getting treatment."^[66] This approach consisted of a deliberately induced exacerbation of the symptoms of illness (i.e., panic) in order to build the patient's resistance. In a pep talk to cadres in which he sought to prepare them to face the aroused masses during the Hundred Flowers, he makes clear that he expected them to undergo a type of trial by ordeal, under-

[65] Mao, "Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art" (May 2, 1942), in SW , vol. 3: 73.

[66] SW , vol. 3: 56.

lining the homeopathic character of the treatment: "Don't seal these things up, otherwise it would be dangerous. In this respect our approach is different from that of the Soviet Union. Why is vaccination necessary? A virus is artificially introduced into a man's body to wage 'germ warfare' against him in order to bring about immunity."^[67] Using a different metaphor to make the same point, he speaks of "tempering" (duanlian ):

Tempering means forging and refining. Forging is shaping by hammering and refining is smelting iron in a blast furnace or making steel in an open-hearth furnace. After steel is made, it needs forging, which nowadays is done with a pneumatic hammer. That hammering is terrific! We human beings need tempering too.^[68]

The patient, finding himself (or herself) suddenly confronted by the feared object, would discover that the object was not as terrible as had been imagined, and the ability to cope with the fear would be concomitantly enhanced. In Mao's view, this realization would permit the patient to realize hitherto-untapped potential.

Mao was convinced that confrontation with the feared object could not only transform subjective emotions and induce individuals to commit themselves to the interests of the collective, but could actually counteract the objective power of the feared thing as well. Having previously relied upon intimidation to dominate a cowed subject, the authority will be so taken aback upon being boldly confronted by a suddenly defiant underling that he is apt to panic and resort to extreme measures, or at least will have to reassess the power balance. It is advisable to reinforce this panic or uncertainty and thus throw the oppressor into utter rout, thereby permanently transforming the relationship between feared and fearful. As Mao put it in a famous passage from his "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan":

People swarm into the houses of local tyrants and evil gentry who are against the peasant association, slaughter their pigs and consume their grain. They even loll for a minute or two on [N.B.—the wording of the unexpurgated text is "tread on and roll in"] the ivory-inlaid beds belonging to the young ladies in the household of the local tyrants and evil gentry. . . . Doing whatever they like and turning everything upside down, they have created a kind of terror in the countryside. This is what some people call "going too far," or "going beyond the proper limits in righting a wrong." . . . A revolution is not a dinner party, [etc.]. . . . To put it bluntly, it is necessary to create terror for a while in every rural area, or otherwise it would be impossible to suppress the authority of the

[67] Mao, "Talks at a Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Region Party Committees" (January 1957), in SW , vol. 5: 369–70.

[68] Mao, "Beat Back the Attacks of the Bourgeois Rightists" (July 9, 1957), in SW , vol. 5: 459.

gentry. Proper limits have to be exceeded in order to right a wrong, or else the wrong cannot be righted.^[69]

Here, as in no passage Mao wrote apropos of the post-Liberation milieu, the underlying aggression implicit in this type of "shock therapy" clearly emerges.

Whatever therapeutic benefits their exemplary suffering or death may have had for the masses, there had never been any pretense that it should benefit the targets —quite the contrary. The landlords, local bullies, and diehard elements functioned as scapegoats, teachers by negative example, objects of catharsis for those they had previously oppressed. This was also the case in the campaigns of the early 1950s examined in chapter 2. Not until the Hundred Flowers was mass criticism with the serious intention of reform turned against any of the emergent socialist contradictions reviewed earlier; the results were so shocking for all elites that the experiment was immediately aborted.

Yet in 1966 Mao was to push the experiment much further than he had in 1957. It was not enough to initiate movements in every factory and village, as had been done in the 1950s; Mao had decided to mobilize the masses to expose "our seamy side" from bottom to top and "in an all-round way."^[70] Untroubled now by the prospect of popular opposition to his own role after several years' vigorous promotion of a "cult" of his own leadership and worldview, Mao encouraged the masses to overcome their fears of criticism by plunging boldly into the maelstrom. "It was I who started the fire," he conceded at the October 1966 work conference. "I think it is good to give people shocks. I thought about it for many years, and at last I came up with the idea of this shock."^[71] Elites and masses had been divided by a barrier of fear, and now they should pierce this barrier and dispel the fear, the masses by attacking the elites whom they had feared, the elites by "turning the character 'fear' (pa ) into 'daring' (gan )" and freely exposing themselves to criticism. To the Red Guards, he wrote several letters praising their revolutionary spirit and authorizing them to "lead yourselves and carry out revolution by your own efforts," and on August 5, he posted "My First Big-Character Poster," urging China's young people by personal example to "bombard the bourgeois headquarters."^[72]

[69] Mao, "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan," in SW , 1:28; as compared with the original text in Mao Zedong Ji [Collected works of Mao Zedong] (Hong Kong: Yishan, 1976), vol. 1: 213. "Tashangqu gun " is the Chinese phrase for "tread on and roll in."

[70] Mao, conversation of February 2, 1967, in Wansui (1969), p. 664.

[71] Mao, "Speech at a Certain Conference" (July 21, 1966), in Wansui (1969), pp. 643–46.

[72] Mao's poster and letters of encouragement to Red Guards are translated in Jerome Ch'en, ed., Mao Papers (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 115–17.

As in 1957, the overwhelming majority of the cadres opposed and sometimes even covertly sabotaged this unprecedented movement. They could not as a rule understand how to lead a movement while serving simultaneously as its prime suspects; all their previous experience told them that the targets of movements came to no good end, and the therapeutic slogans urging them, too, to overcome fears and taboos and expose themselves to mass criticism did not always allay their suspicions. "When you are told to kindle a fire to burn yourselves, will you do it?" Mao challenged them on July 21. "After all, you yourselves may be burned." His audience responded gamely:

We are prepared. If we're not up to it, we will resign our jobs. We live as Communist Party members and will die as Communist Party members. It doesn't do to live a life of sofas and electric fans.^[73]

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin .^[74]

Conclusion

The unexpectedly swift political and economic destruction of the enemies of the revolution after Liberation left the leadership in a quandary. The immediate impulse was to issue a self-congratulatory declaration to the effect that the revolution had been successfully completed, but it was not long before the leadership began to have second thoughts. Notwithstanding progress in the construction of stable planning and administrative institutions, the Chinese system remained essentially a politics of movement, and the leaders were therefore inclined to apprehend that if the revolutionary tide ebbed a counterrevolutionary tide would soon follow that would leave the socialist beachhead marooned. This possibility was illustrated by the unexpectedly "bourgeois" tenor of the criticisms voiced during the Hundred Flowers, and (for Mao) the treachery of Peng Dehuai's assault, with suspected Soviet collusion, upon a Great Leap Peng had only recently supported (or at least not actively opposed). Still more stable institutions and a demobilized mass would seem the obvious answer, and indeed a majority of the leadership seems to have preferred this alternative. And yet these reconstructed institutions were basically inimical to Mao and those of his colleagues most closely identified with the salvationary mission, constituting a new framework of restrictions against which they instinctively revolted.

Mao's analysis of the emergent opposition structure in socialist society

[73] Mao, "Talk to Leaders of the Center" (July 21, 1966), trans. in Stuart Schram, ed., Chairman Mao Talks to the People , pp. 253–56.

[74] "Numbered, numbered, weighed, divided."—Daniel 5: 25. The writing on the wall, interpreted by Daniel to mean that God had weighed Belshazzar and his kingdom, found them wanting, and would destroy them.

was symbolic rather than discursive, elliptical rather than analytic. It is not really necessary to attribute this to Mao's advanced years and the consequent lapse of his intellectual faculties. For Mao to analyze the less appealing aspects of his own regime must have been far more sensitive than to dissect the bourgeois-feudal class structure that existed under Japanese imperialism or KMT dictatorship: the problem of lighting a fire without burning oneself affected the Chairman as well. Ideological precedent stultified his analysis of the dynamics of socialist development, and political considerations inhibited his critique of organizational degeneration. Thus his usual analytical skill was less apparent in his evolving polemic against the "Party persons in authority taking the capitalist road." The various constraints emerging in socialist society to which we alluded above were reduced to "bureaucratism," for example—to the strain between masses and elites. The empirical manifestations of this strain were left so vague that almost any grievance against superior authority could plausibly be attributed to "revisionist" leadership. Though analytically imprecise, this would prove to be a highly effective mobilizational rhetoric, as we shall see in chapter 4.

Inasmuch as the continuing revolution in its cultural phase was to be directed against the excessively disciplined and authoritarian form of organization represented by the Leninist Party-state, the engineering approach preferred by the majority of the cadres (symbolized early in the Cultural Revolution by the issue of "work teams") was really foreclosed from the outset. To be sure, an anarchic cultural revolution against bureaucracy that was protected by an even more stringently disciplined military organization was rather artificial, taking on certain aspects of "queen for a day." But the point of the exercise was pedagogical rather than efficient, with revolution employed as a form of shock therapy. Attachments to prerevolutionary cultural arrangements had become frozen in fear of loss—loss of order, loss of production—and it was hence necessary to shatter fear in order to free its victims for new and more revolutionary commitments. Both participants and their targets would be challenged to overcome their fears by directly confronting the objects of fear. This challenge postulated superhuman forbearance among elites, and imputed great insight and political sophistication to the (not yet fully literate) masses, an ability to make a discrimination between proletarian revolutionary and revisionist leaders that Mao himself had difficulty making, and moreover an ability to do so with little or no organizational guidance. For Communist organizational principles were ideologically suspect and provisionally suspended, only an extremely loose coordination among Red Guard participants being achievable through the media and through personal meetings with trusted leaders in the capital or on site.

This iconoclastic approach to mass therapy is not terra incognita to

social science. Mao's approach appears superficially similar to what in the psychoanalytic literature has been termed the "counterphobic defense" against latent anxiety. This consists of a deliberate attempt to precipitate the event most dreaded in order to obtain a "flight to reality" from the torments of one's perfervid imagination. Analysts deem the counterphobic defense to be successful in dissipating immediate anxieties and in bolstering self-confidence, but to be critically deficient in providing insight into the source of the fear and therefore unable conclusively to resolve the underlying difficulty.^[75] More recent interdisciplinary research views catharsis somewhat more positively, but only under carefully modulated conditions.^[76]

Of course psychotherapeutic findings cannot be extrapolated to the Chinese political scene without considerable caution; as they are based upon dialogues with individual patients (in a clinical setting), they cannot easily take group dynamics into account. And although the concept of counterphobic defense provides a plausible account of the therapeutic premises underlying the criticism movement (at least regarding the relationship between repressed emotions and political catharsis), it fails to predict the political consequences—or indeed, to take into account the political motivations—of revolutionary therapy. Some of these will come into focus in the following chapter.

[75] Cf. Otto Fenichel, "The Counterphobic Attitude," in his Collected Papers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), pp. 163–74.

[76] T. J. Scheff, Catharsis in Healing, Ritual and Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).