communist China and its political movements

After the Communists finally became the leaders of China in 1949, they started an ambitious transformation of Chinese politics, economy, and society. Within the Communist Party, there were different opinions on how to go about the process of transformation. Almost all, however, agreed on several basic approaches, which included the mobilization of the masses, in the form of political campaigns, to make political and economic transformations a populist movement. Some in the communist party wanted to add a more technocratic aspect to these campaigns, but eventually their views would be defeated by the more populist approach. Thus social transformation in Communist China was punctuated by numerous political campaigns.

1. Political campaigns from the 1950s to the 1970s

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

Although these two groups within the Communist Party were united during the anti-Japanese war and in the civil war against the republican government, after they succeeded in taking over the government, these groups could no longer cover up their differences. Their differences were exacerbated by foreign threat from the United States, so that national construction along Western lines in terms of economic planning or government bureaucracy was perceived by members in the Chinese government as bowing to foreign enemies. Furthermore, since many Chinese worked for foreign companies in China or served the Nationalist government in one capacity or another, these people were often interrogated after the Chinese Communist takeover and became the targets of successive political movements because of the suspicion that they were spies.

The Communist call for equality could not overcome the deep-seated mistrust and lack of communication between the urban/educated and rural/illiterate Communists. Reflected at a higher level, the question was, what goals should Communist policies should reflect---a technocratic focus on economic development, or a continuous emphasis on political revolutions and mass mobilization? In the face of foreign threat (e.g., the Korean War, 1950-53, and the possible U.S. invasion of China via Taiwan and north Korea), Chinese Communists who advocated continuous revolutions often triumphed over dissenting colleagues who argued for a technocratic approach that focused on the urban areas and on economic/industrial development. A significant number of Chinese Communists leaders resorted to the traditional strategies of mass political mobilization, which they had used in the 1940s and early 1950s. During the 1940s, the Communists used this form of mass mobilization to conduct land redistribution: in villages where large wealthy landlords existed, they would conduct mass meetings where poor peasants were asked to go up one by one to empty their grievances against the landlord, e.g. charging high interest rates on loans, high rents on tenant farmers, etc. These "mass criticism" meetings were followed by the confiscation and redistribution of the landlord's land. Many poor peasants joined the Communist Party after such land redistribution to protect their newly acquired land. After the Communist takeover, similar mass movements were conducted such as the ones mentioned in the links below:

Early Political Campaigns
The Anti-rightist campaign
The Great Leap Forward (1958)
Cultural Revolution Campaigns

Many of these campaigns sought to build unity in the new Communist republic through a definition of who were the "people" and who were the "enemies of the people." The “people” included those of good class background: poor and middle class peasants, workers, soldiers---hence the massive social classification movement in the early years of Communist takeover. Meanwhile, those expressing criticism against Communist practices were labeled “counter-revolutionaries” or some other names. In 1957, party leader Mao Zedong wanted to sound out the opinions of the intellectuals about the Communist Party. When the criticism was much more extensive than he anticipated, he decided to muffle these critics by labeling them "rightists." Historically, left was associated with radicalism and right with conservatism, so the label "rightist" implied ultra-conservatism in a radical socialist society. Rightists were often thrown into prison or sent to labor camps. These political movements mobilized the masses to conform to the party line and enabled the party to implement its programs with little opposition. It was against the background of these political movements that the Chinese government completed its land collectivization movement and collectivization movement of factories and companies in the cities in the 1950s.

By 1958 almost all private ownership of land, factories, and other companies was eliminated in China. The Great Leap Forward, another political movement in 1958, was an attempt to leap ahead of the capitalist countries in industrial output. It was disastrous because it tried to use simple mass mobilization techniques to achieve high industrial and agricultural output that were achieved through highly developed technologies in Western countries. For instance, to increase steel output, every household was asked to donate their iron pots and pans to where they worked, and their employers, be it a hospital, school, or factory, all built their own backyard furnaces to make steel. Understandably, the steel made in such a way was of low quality and useless. No one dared to criticize this Communist policy and there was much fraud in reporting industrial and agricultural achievements. In the countryside, decisions to dramatically increase agricultural produce led to much fraudulent reporting of agricultural output. One false newspaper report had a baby sitting on top of wheat stalks in a wheat field, indicating the wheat stalks were so thickly grown that they could hold up a baby. When the frauds finally came to light it was too late: instead of the dramatic increase in agricultural output as the propaganda had it, Chinese granaries were all emptied in 1958. A drought that started in 1959 added to the catastrophe and led to three years of famine, which resulted in the deaths of between 25 and 30 million people.

3. The Cultural Revolution 1966-1976

The most thorough and fierce struggle between the technocrats and radical revolutionaries within the Communist Party was carried out in the form of the Cultural Revolution (CR, 1966-76). The CR was begun as a way to purge the technocrats from the party, and Chairman Mao Zedong of the Communist Party again used the strategy of mass mobilization, in the form of Red Guards, Tiananmen Square parades, mass criticism meetings, and parades of the "bad elements". It started with Mao’s article “Bombing the headquarters [of the feudal and bourgeois members in society]” in 1966. Mao interviewed high school students dissatisfied with the college examination system and told them that “rebellion [against their teachers] was justified.” Mao ruled that high school and college entrance examinations and the whole Chinese educational system were in the hands of the technocrats and needed to be reformed, first through the criticism of school teachers, and then their leaders and their leaders’ leaders, which would ultimately get at the technocrats at the top of the government. Therefore following the criticism of school teachers, the second wave of the Cultural Revolution was labeling all those in the Communist leadership who advocated a technocratic approach as “capitalist-roaders.” The procedure is as follows:

• Criticism of the school teachers: Many schools, from primary to tertiary, were shut down from 1966 to 1968.
• Criticism of the capitalist-roaders, from senior- to middle-level Communist leaders (often referred to as cadres in English) View posters against capitalist roaders

Mao charged that there was a conspiracy against him within the Party, perpetrated by those who were high in the party leadership and who wanted to restore capitalism. This accusation resulted in the arrest and death of hundreds of thousands of Communist cadres from the middle level up, not to mention the grassroots level Communists.

4. Forms of criticism used in the Cultural Revolution

The forms of criticism taken during the Cultural Revolution included massive criticism meetings, during and after which those criticized were often forced to wear tall hats and were paraded around. Children of the denounced were often asked to separate from their parents. Picture posters and large word posters (dazibao), and loudspeakers at work units became the means to communicate the latest developments of the CR. View Cultural Revolution posters. The Communist state mobilized the masses through instilling fear (“you are next”), social mobility (the promotion of those who were most actively involved in the revolutionary activities), encouraging telling on one another (some did so to settle personal scores). In the years before 1968, the main force Mao relied on to implement the revolution was the Red Guards, who initially came from high school students in Beijing, and soon included all professions in the cities. The Red Guards, however, soon broke into many factions standing for different figures in the Communist Central party committee, and often settled their differences with armed fights.
Mao also wanted to transform Chinese culture through the CR. With the overthrow of the technocrats from the Communist party, Mao wanted to usher in a completely revolutionary culture in China, which was why it was called a "Cultural Revolution." In those years, massive criticism of feudal and bourgeois cultures was followed by the banning of any and all non-revolutionary music from the West (except from Communist countries like the USSR, Yugoslavia, and Albania), and non-revolutionary or non-patriotic music from pre-1949 China. Revolutionary songs emerged in massive quantities, often Mao’s poems or quotations set to music. The traditional Peking Opera, a regional musical genre that often drew its themes from history, was now borrowed to be “filled with new wine.” Mao decided the operas were too full of emperors, generals, talented scholars and beautiful women, and did not represent the masses, therefore they should be reformed: hence the launching of eight revolutionary operas. View description of Peking Operas.

Another of Mao’s vision was to build a new society that would bridge the gap between the country and the city, and the educated and the illiterate. To do so, he sent millions of Chinese high school graduates to the countryside in the name of reeducation. Starting from 1967, the graduating classes of junior and senior high schools were required to go and work in the countryside, with no date of return. View posters of the reeducation movement. It was also at a time when the factional struggles within the urban Red Guards were getting out of control. Dispersing the Red Guards to the countryside and replacing them with the leadership of more mature industrial workers and soldiers was Mao’s plan to stabilize the cities so that the Cultural Revolution could be continued. Although many of the urban youth who went for reeducation have returned to the cities today, many have permanently settled in the countryside because they married local farmers, which was a condition that barred their return back to their hometown cities after the CR was over.

5. Women and the Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), aimed at a complete cultural transformation of China, including on the issue of gender. Yet it was not the first time the Communist regime tried to erase the symbolic differences between gender. A poem written by Mao Tse-tung glorifying women in military uniform was set to music and became one of the popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s. It went roughly as: Spirited and attractive, with a five feet rifle/arriving at the training ground with the first rays of morning sunshine/how magnificently ambitious Chinese women are/they prefer military uniforms to feminine clothes.

During the Cultural Revolution, violence also became women's identity, especially because they wanted to escape from a conventional perception of them as passive and gentle, which were all labeled as "bourgeois" by Mao during the Cultural Revolution. It was not uncommon for girls to interrogate and beat up the "bad elements." Women invariably dressed as men or as male army combatants because it was "considered very glorious." And often, the belt on their uniform became their instrument to beat up their suspects. Rejecting a bourgeois lifestyle and engaging in aggressive, violent attacks both mandated that girls dress like boys, cut their hair like boys, and borrow their fathers (not their mothers') leather belts.

(The above is from Emily Honig, "Maoist Mapping of Gender: Reassessing the Red Guards," 255-268, in Susan Brownell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom eds., Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002])

During the Cultural Revolution, political correctness consisted largely in women wearing the same dark colors as men, keeping their hair short, and using no make-up. On the other hand, men did not have to dress up like women. Therefore, it was women’s symbolic difference from men, reflected in their appearances (clothes, hair style, etc.), that was repressed by the state. Compared with Western feminists who try to deal with gender based on the differences between men and women, in China, gender differences were minimized. In the West, women can protest against their marginalized status. In China, women find their political identity completely determined by how the state defines it and how this definition is implemented by the All –China Women's Federation.

(The above is a paraphrasing from Lydia H. Liu, "Invention and Intervention: The Making of a Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature," 149-174, in Susan Brownell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom eds., Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002])

6. The End of the Cultural Revolution

One of the events that slowed down the cultural revolutionary fervor was the death of vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Lin Biao, long Mao’s designated heir. Mao’s longevity made Lin Biao despair of his chance to be the next number one leader of Communist China. Mao’s tendency to purge all around him made Lin Biao suspect he could be next victim. On Sept.13, 1971, Lin Biao crashed his plane in Mongolia en route to the Soviet Union. Lin was trying to flee China after his plot against Mao was discovered. Frustrated with his frail health and Mao’s increasingly suspiciousness of every one around him, Lin Biao feared that before he was able to succeed Mao, he would become his next target of persecution. In early 1971, Lin Biao plotted to place a bomb on the railroad where Mao’s train was to cross. The plot was found out. Before Mao completely ascertained that Lin Biao was behind it all, Lin decided to run for his life. Along with his wife and son, the latter being the head of the Chinese air force, they boarded a not sufficiently fueled plane. Perhaps as a sign of magnanimity to someone who had been so close to him, Mao let him go without having the plane shot down. The so-called “Lin Biao Incident” significantly dampened Mao’s political zeal.

One of the consequences of Mao's disillusionment was the improvement of Sino-U.S. relations. Even Mao started to question his own radical revolutionary beliefs and tactics. Thus he was ready to improve relations with his archenemy the United States. Nixon was eager to improve relations with China to prove that China was more nationalist than Communist, hence providing the rhetoric for the U.S. to evacuate her troops from Vietnam: leaving Vietnam would not leave Vietnam a power vacuum for a Communist takeover from China. Nixon visited China in Dec. 1971 and signed a Communiqué with China’s premier Zhou Enlai in Jan. 1972, paving the way for normalizing the relationship between the two countries, which eventually happened in 1979 under the Carter administration.

Another event that helped bring about the end of the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s death in Sept. 1976. The moderate elements in the Communist party that survived the CR immediately arrested Mao’s wife and three of her cohorts (together called the Gang of Four) on charges that they started the Cultural Revolution and wanted to usurp the power of the country. View posters against the Gang of Four. The arrest of the Gang of Four was followed by the reinstitution of Deng Xiaoping. He was the right-hand man to the Communist Party technocrat Liu Shaoqi before the Cultural Revolution, and he was denounced as the second biggest “capitalist-roader” in the Cultural Revolution and put under house arrest for ten years. Over the next twenty years Deng served as the number one leader who directed China’s modernization program. Starting from January 1978, Deng declared that China needed to modernize in order to become strong. On his agenda were industry, commerce, and the return of Hong Kong to China. With the new policy, China slowly but gradually reopened to the outside world. Scholarly communications were reestablished with Western countries, foreign investments were encouraged, first in four coastal cities, then in a greater number of cities.