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]