Quotes from the introduction:
With the largest navy, the most advanced technology, and unprecedented
agricultural productivity, the Ming Dynasty remained the most
extensive and powerful political structure in the world. In every way
it matched and surpassed Europe, and the question of China’s “failed”
transition to capitalism (known as “Needham’s Paradox”) would become a
sort of initiatory riddle for future scholars of the region. [Galeote] Pereira
had arrived in the midst of the Ming’s deterioration, caused in part
by the Portuguese and Spanish silver industries and the new trade
networks of which he was himself a product.
“China” was very much a product of the Occidental imagination. The
people Pereira asked had trouble even understanding the question of
what “country” they were from, as there were no clear indigenous
correlates to the concept. Ultimately they explained that there was
one ruler, but many countries, which still used their ancient names.
The combination of these countries composed the “Great Ming,” but each
retained much of its local specificity.
Today, in a crisis-stricken global economy, China is again defined by
its exceptions. Its staggering ascent seems to promise an almost
messianic escape from decades of declining growth: the mirage of a new
America, complete with a “Chinese Dream” and the moral zeal of its
Puritanical CCP-Confucianism. For the Western economist, this takes
the form of a steady-handed Sino-Keynesianism, as new infrastructure
projects are initiated by more charitable global financial
institutions such as the China Development Bank, promising the
salvation of the world’s final far-flung hinterlands. In the official
discourse of the Chinese state, this represents nothing more than the
slow transition to communism, with a long layover in the stage of
“socialism with Chinese characteristics,” wherein capitalist
mechanisms are used to develop the productive forces until general
wealth is possible.
Instead, the socialist developmental regime designates the breakdown
of any mode of production and the disappearance of the abstract
mechanisms (whether tributary, filial, or marketized) that govern
modes of production as such. Under these conditions, only strong
state-led strategies of development were capable of driving
development of the productive forces. The bureaucracy grew because the
bourgeoisie couldn’t. Given China’s poverty and position relative to
the long arc of capitalist expansion, only the “big push”
industrialization programs of a strong state, paired with resilient
local configurations of power, were capable of successfully
constructing an industrial system. But the construction of an
industrial system is not the same as the successful transition to a
new mode of production.
Even at the height of its diversity, however, this project was
ultimately defined by a particular communist horizon that had emerged
from the combination of the European workers’ movement and the
region’s own history of millenarian peasant revolts. Today, this
communist horizon no longer exists. There is no point in “taking
sides” on these historical matters, simply because there is no
symmetry between then and now—the material conditions (rapid
industrial expansion, large non-capitalist periphery, etc.) that
structured this earlier communist horizon are absent, even if the
fundamental crises of capitalism remain. There is no question of
whether communists today will face the same problems—they won’t.
Instead, there remains only the question of how communism and
communist strategy can be conceived without this horizon.
Beyond this, the geography of Russian influence was uneven. Outside
the northeastern industrial heartland, Chinese production was more
strongly shaped by other systems of enterprise management, economic
planning and state administration. If the Chinese took Russia as one
model, they also inherited numerous others—from the imperial era, the
Nationalist regime of the Republican period, the Japanese, and the
Western enterprises in coastal cities. All of these influences were
combined in conscious attempts to create a distinctly “Chinese”
nation, complete with a unified national economy. The result was a far
more decentralized, uneven system than is visible in the era’s
propaganda.
The result, we hope, is a picture of socialist China as it actually
was, neither a totalitarian wasteland nor the kingdom of heaven. The
nation we illustrate below was not “Mao’s China” in any meaning of the
phrase. It was a project constructed by millions of people, and its
ultimate (though not historically determined) result is the China we
see today—a China that holds the global economy together at its
disintegrating roots. A China that, we hope, will also finally be
undone by more millions of Chinese people, alongside billions of
others destroying their thousand nations and, with them, this
monstrous economy that yokes each to all and all to none.
Quotes from Part I: Precedents:
Development in the imperial era does not begin with the stasis of a
so-called “traditional China.” The imperial state, often in
competition with members of the landowning elite, periodically
intervened in rural society, each time reshaping its social character.
In one of the last significant interventions (inaugurating the late
imperial period), the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) attempted to create an
independent peasantry in order to eliminate rivals vying for control
over the rural surplus product and to stabilize society. In order to
do this, peasants were given land, although not as equitably as
originally intended. At this time, as in much of the region’s history,
peasants were not just farmers: they farmed but also produced
handicraft items, in particular silk or cotton cloth. And the Ming
state, as with earlier ruling dynasties, encouraged this dual
production by requiring tax payments in grain, cloth and labor.
Earlier in the Ming, most rural households had not produced
commodities for sale on markets, but had instead produced a variety of
goods for subsistence and then sold a small surplus to the rural
gentry, who would then re-sell those products as commodities. But
with increased commercialization and specialization, more households
began to focus on commodity production without abandoning subsistence
production for their family units: a situation of commercialization
without development. Over time many began to satisfy their
reproductive needs through market purchases as well, with areas that
produced higher-end goods buying food through regional markets from
more peripheral areas. And it was the rural gentry that controlled
those markets.
Not that it's identical (in circumstance), but this seems to be coming back in some (possibly more negative) ways for people in rural places to make money. As described in Blockchain Chicken Farm, rural people are engaging in practices to help keep up with their needs while also producing things deemed commodities (including food) that are then sent to the cities (as sales through Alibaba or other companies).
In some ways, it seems like they're re-using historical structures but adding some technology to them as "progress." (But it reminds me of the shoe-maker in a small village described in the book talking about how the current model is ruining their lives and that it's not possible to keep doing what they're doing.)
Tea producers, for example, suffered from the 1880s onward once the
British tea plantations in South Asia were producing in full swing. In
the cotton textile industry, spinners of yarn had a hard time
competing with foreign, machine-spun yarns. In contrast, the cheap
imports of such yarn initially allowed cloth weavers to do well, and
only over time did they, too, have increasing trouble on the new
market. Foreign-owned industrial weaving facilities along the
coast—mostly built since the turn of the century—began to cut into the
handicraft market. Sourcing much of its yarn from abroad, the industry
led in part to the initial disintegration of the rural-urban
continuum.
This bit is interesting when you consider how a lot of European and North American economics texts talk about China today and how their "cheap products" have "cut into" the markets for what's being done. So it's interesting to see that industrial yarn development (often foreign-owned) was cutting into the traditional market here. Perhaps it would do us well to recognise the many ways Europe (and North America) interrupted lives through colonialism and imperialism.
During this new phase, the Nationalist Party (Guomindang, hereafter
GMD) that had taken over much of China by the end of the 1920s
attempted to complete the capitalist transition and build a national
economy by creating a stronger link between industrial facilities in
the coastal cities and the raw materials produced in rural China. By
the early 1930s, factions of the GMD consciously looked to an Italian
Fascist model of economic independence and productivism to reintegrate
the rural and urban spheres. This implied strong government control
over internal markets and state-private cooperation in
industrialization. Yet these policies were sidelined by administrative
weakness, GMD leader Chiang Kai-shek’s focus on military development,
and the subsequent Japanese invasion of the Chinese coast in 1937 that
inaugurated World War Two in Asia.
Note: The GMD mentioned here is the same thing as the KMT (Kuomintang).
Considering their later actions in Taiwan, a lot of this is unsurprising.
By the time of the Japanese invasion, the GMD found its main
opposition in the form of a peasant army mobilized by a reinvented
Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But the CCP itself had begun decades
earlier, born out of the same tumultuous intellectual milieu as the
GMD itself, both of which began as largely urban affairs. The CCP’s
1921 founding congress was originally intended to take place in
Shanghai. Disrupted by police, the meeting was moved north to Jiaxing,
where twelve delegates founded the CCP as a branch of the Communist
International. As this early CCP grew, it remained a mostly urban
project, staffed by intellectuals and skilled industrial workers. Six
years after its founding, it was again in Shanghai that this first
incarnation of the CCP came to its violent end. In a Russian-backed
alliance with the GMD, revolutionaries seized control over most of
China’s key cities in a series of worker-staffed insurrections. After
victory was secured with the success of the 1927 Shanghai
Insurrection, the GMD turned against the communists, arresting a
thousand CCP members and leaders of local trade unions, officially
executing some three hundred and disappearing thousands more.
The only surviving fragments of the CCP were its rural bases among the
peasantry.
Alongside the gang boss and labor contractor there were also guild
masters and secret societies. Though often initially founded under the
Qing as rebel organizations of one kind or another, under the
Nationalists the guild and secret society took on the character of
criminal rackets. Each also helped to shape the forms of labor
deployment that would develop in this early period of capitalist
integration. Guilds deemphasized the art of the craft in favor of
seeking lucrative contracts. They “became fledgling capitalist
construction companies whose managers, the guild masters, hired people
for wages that were quickly returned to the guild in the form of
membership fees […] Brutality in enforcing the guild’s monopoly over
hiring and construction was common.”
Secret societies, outlawed under the Qing, had helped staff the 1911
Republican revolution and, in return, were permitted to operate openly
for the first time. This fundamentally transformed the function of the
secret society and ended the period in which they could be understood
as “primitive revolutionaries.” Some “remained faithful to their
‘social bandit’ origins” and joined the Communist Party. But the rest became run-of-the-mill reactionaries...
The influence of such groups grew in the vacuum created by the
destruction of the communist labor unions and Party cells after 1927.
The result was a city in which labor contractors, the gang boss
system, the guilds and the secret societies all formed a complex mesh
of labor deployment defined by both the dependence on the wage and the
threat of direct violence common in colonial regimes of accumulation.
In this sense, the conditions of CCP politics mirrored that of the
GMD, with its focus on national unity, although the CCP was better
able to bridge the contradiction between these two politics with the
concept of “the people.” A focus on national unity was incomplete and
one sided. “The people,” by contrast, was defined neither solely by
national citizenship nor by one’s class. Instead, one’s subjective
stance towards the revolution placed one within or outside of “the
people.” Thus even the national bourgeoisie (Chinese capitalists who
did not collaborate directly with foreign powers) and patriotic rich
peasants and landlords could become members of “the people,” so long
as they threw their weight (and resources) behind the revolution. This
focus on subjectivity would remain a strong component of CCP politics
from that time on.
Faced with a labor shortage toward the beginning of the 1940s, the
Japanese soon turned to more coercive means of recruitment. This
included forcing students, prisoners, vagrants and the floating
population of unemployed or casual workers into largely unpaid and
compulsory labor service, all formalized by the April 1940 National
Army Law which sought universal conscription into the military and
industrial development projects. Those not pulled into the army itself
were sent to the national labor corps “between the ages of twenty and
twenty-three [to] work in military construction, essential industries
or local production.” The brutality of this labor regime is not to be
underestimated, and has been quite fairly compared to the European
holocaust in the scale and scope of its devastation.
Throughout this period, then, attempts to rationalize and modernize
labor deployment through the implementation of Taylorist methods and
the use of hourly wages co-existed with and were ultimately superseded
by regimes that relied, in the last instance, on the threat of
violence, whether this be at the hand of the gang-boss or through the
revival of systems of corveé labor and “tributary” methods of
production and trade. This bore degrees of similarity to various forms
of pre-capitalist accumulation seen throughout Eurasia, and authors
writing on the Manchurian labor system have sloppily referred to it as
“feudal.” More importantly, these “feudal” aspects of the labor regime
are often portrayed as being in tension with the properly “rational,”
Taylorist system of labor deployment through the wage relation.
But this opposition is not so clear. Despite its allegedly “feudal”
elements, the Japanese industrialization of the Chinese mainland can
well be seen as the initiation of a transition to an explicitly
capitalist mode of production dominated by value production. Rather
than seeing the build-up of the Japanese wartime complex (or its
German, Italian or American counterparts) as driven by simple military
madness, we must understand these military expansions as necessities
of accumulation posed by states facing limits to their growth and
mired in a crisis of value production. The Japanese colonization of
the mainland was a response to a crisis of global capitalism. In one
sense, this can be understood as a process of “primitive
accumulation,” but only if we sever the term from its connotations of
an expanding commercial capitalism, circa the European gestation of
the capitalist mode of production in its Genoese, Dutch or British
sequences.
The Japanese scaling-up of the gang-boss system and the implementation
of forced labor were not, then, in any way a form of backsliding into
pre-capitalist modes of production. They were instead a capitalist
logic of production taken to its extreme—literally a last-ditch effort
to preserve the capitalist social relations that ensured the continued
accumulation of value on the East Asian mainland. Compounding growth
rates, the increasing circulation of commodities across the domestic
market and the beginning of the urban demographic transition all
followed, alongside the mass proletarianization of ex-peasant
migrants. These forms of labor deployment were in fact the ultimate
complement to the Taylorist “rationalization” campaigns, because, in
the face of labor shortage and military defeats, it was only these
forms of labor deployment that worked, or, more accurately: got people
working.
The GMD was utterly unable to manage this vast new bureaucracy.
Incapable of reining in inflation, the dire economic trends initiated
under the Japanese continued under the Nationalists, who were
ill-suited to restart the project of imperial expansion begun by their
predecessors. The middle class that had started to form prior to the
invasion was now all but liquidated. A new bureaucratic warlordism
arose alongside and within the collapsing GMD, creating nearly perfect
conditions for the growth of the communist armies in the countryside.
As the GMD began to cede territory to the CCP in the Civil War, this
Japanese-built state-industrial structure was the most intact
component of non-agricultural production that the communists
inherited. Manchuria was conquered early on with substantial military
assistance from Russia, which gave significant amounts of ammunition,
artillery, tanks and aircraft to the communist army while also
assisting in the reconstruction of the Manchurian railroad system. But
this assistance also came at significant cost, as Stalin ordered
Russian troops to partner with the GMD and loot Manchurian factories
in order to recuperate the USSR’s own war-strained industry.
The decisions confronted there, more than anywhere else, cut to the
root of the communist project. If the Party were to simply seize the
industrial infrastructure built by the Japanese, they risked
reigniting the brutal expansionary process for which these industries
were built and reconstructing the bureaucracy necessary to keep them
running. Even if the Party devolved direct control of these industries
to the remaining workers trained to run them, this would have done
nothing to solve the structural problems inherent in how these
large-scale factories functioned, nor the challenge posed by their
geographical concentration. The gang-boss hierarchy could be filled
with elected representatives, but this would have simply replaced a
more Darwinian bureaucracy with a democratic one.
The problem was how, precisely, to utilize the productive capacity of
this inherited infrastructure while simultaneously transforming
society’s relations of production—a transformation that can only occur
at a scale much larger than the individual enterprise, and which is in
no way produced by a linear agglomeration of small changes made in
individual workers’ relationships to individual workplaces, though
these are obviously important and occur at every stage in the process.
It was only in confronting this larger problem, then, that the Party’s
own theories of industrial organization would become relevant. These
top-down theories, meanwhile, were often paired with the bottom-up
activity of workers in these industries, whose own opinions on these
questions contributed to the overall heterogeneity of the communist
project, which was by no means reducible to the CCP. The next three
decades would be marked by struggles over the transformation and
expansion of this industrial inheritance, with the Party absorbing
many of these heterogeneous positions in the securing of its strategic
hegemony—a hegemony premised on the potentials of production.
The socialist era was indeed a time of transition, in which a
“national economy” was gradually sewn together out of disparate
economic sub-regions and various methods of labor deployment. But the
most fundamental characteristic of this “national economy”—the one
feature that could be said to span city and countryside, determining
the relationship between the two—was the implementation of the grain
standard and the net funneling of resources from countryside to city.
> In other words, the lynchpin of the entire development project was the
widening of the urban rural divide, despite the increase of the
country’s total social wealth.
In reality, capitalism has not been the only mode of production that
saw major processes of urbanization. Nevertheless, it is often simply
assumed that the abolition of capitalism entails the abolition of the
city and the explosion of industry into a “garden city” of fields,
factories and workshops,” in which population itself must be roughly
equalized across inhabited territory. Marx and Engels’ own work
exacerbates this confusion. The “more equitable distribution of
population over town and country” is one of the ten measures advanced
in the Communist Manifesto. Though this can be understood as a
response to the particular rural-urban inequalities that had arisen in
Europe at the time, it is then made ahistorical in The Origin of the
Family, where Engels claims the city as a basic “characteristic of
civilization,” and thereby an origin-point for all early class
structures.
It's actually interesting how frequently this is misunderstood and overlooked; there have been numerous cities that were built without capitalism as their mode of production/economics (such as Cahokia) because the cities were not sufficiently "urbanised" by Eurocentric values. I'm glad this was included.
The situation changed, however, upon the completion of the Civil War.
In the later-liberated southern port cities, many owners and managers
remained present, leveraging precious technical skills and access to
foreign credit in exchange for favorable treatment by the Party. More
importantly, victory in the war meant that the communists had seized
several of the country’s largest urban areas precisely when the
wartime stimulus to these cities’ industries was faltering and the
US-backed economic blockade had just begun. The number of workers and
wartime refugees skyrocketed, but many of the industries in the
coastal cities had been bombed by the Japanese or sabotaged by the
retreating GMD. In Guangzhou alone, “it was reported in December 1949
that less than a quarter of the city’s enterprises were operating at
full capacity, while nearly a third of the entire workforce was
unemployed.”
Nonetheless, attempts at agrarian forms of socialism were not without
precedent, as anarchists, republicans and communists alike had
advocated and even attempted to build such egalitarian rural projects
in the past, particularly in the New Village, Rural Reconstruction and
Village Cooperation movements of the early 20th century. Some, such as
the Tolstoyan anarchist Liu Shipei, envisioned the end goal of any
egalitarian project in China to be anti-modern in character, returning
the country to its agrarian heritage. Many of the CCP’s earliest
members had emerged from the anarchist movement and retained more than
a little fidelity to decentralized models of development that mixed
industrial and agricultural activity and thereby encouraged
out-migration from urban cores.
Would this be linked to what happened with the labour education movement in Shanghai (which had an anarchist tone)?
Name: Liu Shipei
The restructuring of the economy was coordinated by three main actors.
First, there was the military, “which sent representatives (who were
also Party members) to individual factories where they claimed the
authority of the new government.” But these military representatives
were not particularly familiar with industrial production and,
therefore, had to rely on the hierarchy of technicians and
administrators already in place. Secondly, there was the urban wing of
the CCP itself, many members of which were skilled workers.
Nonetheless, the Party’s urban wing was small and accustomed to
operating within a rigid command hierarchy necessitated by secrecy.
Whereas the rural Party’s experience mediating between simultaneous
social conflicts and administering large swaths of production had made
it a flexible and adaptable organization, the urban Party’s experience
had been far more limited.
Finally, there were “the skilled, literate workers who, with the
blessings of the Communist Party, were quickly promoted to positions
of leadership in the factories by the trade unions.” But these workers
were sparse, due to widespread illiteracy among both urban residents
and the majority of CCP cadre: “In Shanghai alone […] the illiteracy
rate for all employees, including clerks and white-collar workers, was
estimated at 46 percent.” Meanwhile, “among blue-collar factory
workers, this figure was much higher, probably near the 80 percent
figure for industrial personnel in the whole country.” By contrast,
“in 1949 almost all of the students in Chinese universities and higher
level technical schools were from the urban middle and upper middle
classes.” And these students were no longer simply elites educated in
the Confucian classics. Instead, “well over half (63 percent) of the
members of this group who were university and technical school
graduates in 1949 had majored in subjects that were essential for
industrialization.”
The Party’s response was to launch a recruitment drive, hoping to
bolster its ranks with loyal intellectuals and skilled technicians.
The risk of careerism and corruption was clearly noted, but these were
considered necessary evils that could later be uprooted. Meanwhile,
new unions were formed alongside the new Party organs, intended to
simultaneously rationalize production and provide workers with some
oversight over the new, less trustworthy Party recruits. At first, the
Party had attempted to weed out former gang-bosses, GMD-union thugs
and secret society members from its restructured industrial system,
but this proved to be nearly impossible and the attempt only further
stalled the recuperation of industry. Local cadre were instructed to
open recruitment in the new unions, hoping that workers’ own political
perceptiveness combined with state-sponsored reform campaigns would be
sufficient to prevent these lower-tier elites from regaining power.
Many urban workers had felt disappointed or betrayed by the
continuation of capitalism in the port cities, and the early 1950s saw
a slow increase in industrial agitation. The new state responded to
this dissatisfaction in several ways. First, concessions were given to
many workers. Wages increased and most urbanites’ livelihoods were
significantly improved—not necessarily a difficult task, since peace
alone was an improvement on two decades of war and occupation. Second,
new mass organizations were created, including new unions and a
national Labor Board, in an attempt to provide less economically
disruptive means to solve workplace grievances.[78] Though these new
organizations often proved clunky and unresponsive, they were still
initially seen as an important tool for the reorganization of industry
and for the devolution of more power to workers.
Many anarchists had hoped to strengthen these local forms of
resistance into an egalitarian revolutionary movement aimed at
expanding the potentials of statelessness already present in Chinese
village culture. These attempts, however, were systematic failures.
Several of the most prominent anarchists in China, including Li
Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, Zhang Ji and Zhang Jingjiang, ultimately joined
and had leading roles within the Nationalist Party, sitting on its
central committee and forming close relationships with Chiang Kai-Shek
and other members of the GMD’s right-wing. Those that retained their
belief in an egalitarian and essentially communist revolution, faced
with the failures of anarchism, flocked to the newly-founded CCP.
On top of this, the CCP had itself been reformatted by its years in
the Chinese countryside. Previously, the leading minds of the Party,
such as Chen Duxiu and Wang Ming, had been unambiguously
internationalist, and had leveled critiques against rising nationalist
trends within the Party itself. Many of the Party’s rank-and-file
were, in this period, laborers and trade unionists in the port cities,
their everyday lives marked by cosmopolitan contact with workers,
technicians and revolutionaries of various leanings from all over the
world—but especially Europe and the colonies of Southeast Asia.
Quotes from Part II: Development:
But what scholars often classify as the “Soviet Model” actually covers
two alternating tendencies in industrial organization and enterprise
management, the first influenced by High Stalinist methods of mass
mobilization campaigns alongside “crash production drives and close
supervision by Party committees,” and the second more in line with the
USSR’s five-year plans of the 1930s, a method of organization
“encapsulated in one-man management” which “in effect imposed a strict
hierarchical and bureaucratic order over enterprises that was
antithetical to the mobilizational impulses of High Stalinism.”
At the same time, the elimination of the handicrafts industry and the
market networks that had undergirded relations between city and
countryside ensured that most of China’s industrial activity was now
urban, and that the population would be more strictly concentrated in
urban industries or dispersed across the agricultural collectives
being created at this time. Most importantly: the divide between urban
and rural was now becoming a clear geographic divide between
grain-producing and grain-consuming regions, with the grain-consumers
as the primary targets of industrialization.
The easiest solution to this problem, adopted as a local fix by
enterprises across the country, was the practice of “replacement
(dingti),” in which the enterprise would hire relatives and children
of current employees into the same work unit. Because of the
constraints on hiring, “the Chinese government inadvertently promoted
an intensely localistic practice of work-unit occupational
inheritance.” In so doing, the CCP revived the family unit as an
integral source of social privilege, fusing it to the danwei and
thereby to the state itself. Families that had poor placement or
little clout in their enterprises held little bargaining power and
therefore saw their family members deported to far-off cities (often
in the interior) by the demands of national labor allocation. This
created a financial and emotional stress that further prevented such
families from ascending the distributional hierarchy.
Again, this reminds me of things that were written about in Blockchain Chicken Farm, where the author discusses how there were still elements and places that utilised the same system of children working in (and taking over) their parents' positions but that this was becoming less common among those who saw new industries.
The collective dining halls and the huge size of communes made it
almost impossible for peasants to see how their labor affected their
own subsistence. The accounting and workpoints systems had basically
broken down. As crop yields dropped in 1959, food began to run out in
the dining halls and peasants stayed home to conserve energy.
Collective control over labor disintegrated. Most free dining halls
only lasted three months, and in the fall of 1958 even commune cadres’
salaries were stopped. Meals in the dining halls that continued to
exist in 1959 had to be purchased with meal tickets given out
according to work. By the spring of 1959, the Central Committee tried
to push the communes back into a system of remuneration according to
labor: “The principle of distribution according to labor means
calculating payment according to the amount of labor one does. The
more work done, the more one will earn.” And summer harvests were to
be distributed with 60 to 70% according to labor.
Cadre lost control of the rural population, which took matters into
its own hands by stealing from communal stores, scavenging for food,
eating the green shoots of plants before grain could ripen and fleeing
the countryside. Resistance was punished, in turn, with violence and
the withholding of food rations, potentially a death sentence at the
time. In the wake of famine, rebuilding state institutions and Party
power in the countryside would prove a very difficult task.
The uncontrollable flood of migrants into the cities over the course of the 1950s—first pursuing jobs in the new industries and then fleeing the famine in the countryside—provided the impetus to use hukou records to fix people in their home villages. This was achieved through the apportioning of state benefits according to one’s registration status—effectively preventing rural out-migrants from obtaining jobs in the city. Through the urban danwei system, urban hukou holders would be provided a quota of grain at a state-subsidized price, while rural hukou holders were required to produce grain and would not receive state rations, instead receiving rights to a plot of land, or a direct portion of co-operative, then collective, agricultural output.
Workers in such joint-owned enterprises, then, not only found
themselves lacking the privileges of their counterparts in state-owned
heavy industry, but also saw the benefits they had wrested from
factory owners over the past decade gradually stripped away. Under
“joint ownership,” they increasingly lost their opportunities to
participate in management, witnessing the evisceration of the
democratic institutions that had been built within the enterprise as a
counter-power to that of private owners. Many of these private owners,
alongside the management personnel they had employed, were simply
transferred to positions of authority within the new industrial
structure, making the obliteration of workers’ own institutions all
the more insulting. Maybe more importantly, the sheer numbers of
managers, supervisors and other administrative personnel skyrocketed,
composing “more than a third of total employees in Shanghai’s joint
enterprises.” This increase in administrative personnel was made
necessary by the scale of consolidation and the chaotic character of
the port cities’ pre-existing industrial infrastructure. Nonetheless,
the practice appeared purely unproductive from the standpoint of most
rank-and-file workers, instigating further resentment.
In late 1956 and early 1957, sensing the unrest and frightened by
recent revolts against Soviet-backed regimes in Eastern Europe, the
CCP sponsored a wide-ranging “policy of (limited) liberalization and
democratization and increased scope for criticism of the Party,” in
what was known as the “Hundred Flowers” campaign. In standard
portrayals of the period, Mao calls for criticism of the Party, and
students and intellectuals follow suit. Once the movement gets out of
hand, with heavy critiques leveled at the Party and comparisons being
made to the rebellion in Hungary, the Party initiates the
Anti-Rightist campaign later in 1957 to reign in the movement and
punish those who had spoken too harshly of the leadership. There is
often an ambiguity in these accounts about whether or not the Hundred
Flowers’ movement had been a sort of trick to draw the Party
leadership’s potential enemies out into the light. But, whether a
trick or an earnest attempt at reform, most of these accounts are
consistent in their portrayal of the movement as a largely top-down
affair, primarily involving students and intellectuals.
This connects well to what's happening today (in terms of the lessons learned about "liberal democracy." Give people something that masquerades as a "responsive" and "participatory" system, and it helps cool down the issues of repression.
That is, for people who aren't repressed.
In reality, the Hundred Flowers campaign was a response to the extreme
social conflicts that had arisen over the course of the First
Five-Year Plan. It merely recognized dynamics already reaching a
boiling point across Chinese society and concealed them beneath the
complaints of students and intellectuals—figures who could easily be
dismissed as vestiges of the old society. Directly acknowledging the
antagonism that existed among urban workers would have, in effect,
raised the question of whether the Party had lost the mandate of the
working class. This also entailed that, after the fact, workers had to
be “written out of the Hundred Flowers story as protestors, being
present only as defenders of the Party during the anti-rightist
campaign.” But the reality was quite different.
It's interesting how intellectuals are often used in this manner by authoritarians.
In some cases, this intra-enterprise division took on extreme forms
and strikes were crushed by more privileged workers themselves, with
no need for directives from the central government. During a dispute
at the Shanghai Fertilizer Company in May 1957, 41 temporary workers
who had been promised regular status but had then been abruptly laid
off attacked union officials, demanding to be re-instated as regular
workers. After nearly beating the union director and vice-director to
death, the union, youth league and permanent workers vowed to solve
the conflict themselves, and the permanent workers “even stockpiled
weapons in preparation for killing the temporary workers.” Before this
could happen, however, the municipal authorities stepped in and
arrested the temporary worker leaders.
Given the dangers posed by open worker revolt, the Party not only
sided with the more privileged members of the industrial
workforce—i.e., older permanent workers with urban-based families
employed in heavy industries—but also sought, initially, to reform
systems of industrial and political management. As early as the fall
of 1956, the upper echelons of the Party had realized that the strike
wave, still in its infancy, was rooted in deeper conflicts that were
themselves engendered by national industrial policy. Events in Eastern
Europe further verified these fears. At the Eight Party Congress the
Soviet Model influenced by the five-year plans of the 1930s, with
“one-man management” at its core, was rejected in favor of the
alternate Soviet Model, based on High Stalinist principles, which
favored mass mobilization, workers’ participation, and direct
supervision and management by Party committees instead of technocratic
leadership by factory directors and engineers.
Though endorsed at high levels and rendered into socialist mythology
via historical comparisons with the USSR, the mobilizational policies
that resulted were often more the product of local, practical
solutions to factory and city-scale conflicts and, in many instances,
would ultimately exceed what central authorities considered acceptable
concessions to the workers. In many factories, workers’ congresses
were founded, “consisting of directly elected representatives who
could be recalled by workers at any time,” a form of organization that
was pushed for by then-chairman of the All-China Federation of Trade
Unions (ACFTU), Lai Ruoyu, who “identified democratization of
management as the feature which distinguished socialist enterprises
from capitalist ones.”
In terms of repression, workers suffered far more than students or
intellectuals. Though the crackdown on strikes was concurrent with the
Anti-Rightist campaign, workers were denied the political status of
“rightists.” Instead, they were given the classification of “bad
elements,” implying a simple criminality rather than any sort of
principled political opposition. This was no difference of semantics:
“workers, and some union officials, were in fact imprisoned and sent
to labour camps in the aftermath of the Hundred Flowers movement, and
some were executed.” When high-ranking ACFTU officials such as Lai
Ruoyu, Li Xiuren and Gao Yuan stood behind the workers, even going so
far as to advocate for independent unions, the result was
vilification, dismissal, and a general purge of the ACFTU.
It is untenable, then, to simply attribute the failure of the strike
wave to the state’s repressive measures. For the most part, the state
simply did not have to intervene. Divisions within the
workforce—particularly along lines of seniority and regular versus
temporary status—were often sufficient to prevent the strikers’
demands from galvanizing wider support. The striking workers were
often the minority in their own enterprises, and their demands were
just as often violently opposed by other workers, as in the example of
the Shanghai Fertilizer company.
The Party would soon leverage this fact, portraying strikers as “bad
elements” with non-proletarian family backgrounds attempting to trick
other workers into participation in an anti-communist conspiracy.
Despite the exaggeration of this propaganda, the kernel of truth here
was simply that a significant bulk of the national industrial
workforce was sufficiently satisfied with their positions to be wary
of losing them. This was especially true among the older workers, who
not only held higher wages and received more benefits, but also
remembered the abysmal conditions of work prior to the revolution.
The result was that no mode of production fully cohered during the
socialist developmental regime—and it is precisely because of this
that the state itself, increasingly fused with the Party (and,
ultimately, the military) played the mechanical role of ordering
production, distribution and growth. In some cases this entailed
mimicking patterns seen in the transition to capitalism, in other
cases importing practices, technicians and entire factories from the
USSR, and in still others replicating or reinventing forms of labor
deployment, infrastructural development and cultural mobilization that
bore significant resemblance to practices found in the region’s
history.
At the same time, because these methods of accumulation were
mechanical, the state tended to ossify into a stiff bureaucracy if any
one policy or method was in place for too long. At each point, new
practices were adopted not out of ideological attachment or as neutral
tools in factional battles, but most often as a bricolage of makeshift
responses to an accumulation of myriad local crises. Throughout the
socialist era, each policy shift was also a method of re-oiling
ossified state mechanisms through modification and reinvention. In
extreme cases, these shifts were accompanied by large-scale purges and
re-staffing.
But this decentralization also caused new forms of competitive chaos,
as different segments of local hierarchies competed for control over
the new powers devolved to cities and provinces. In some cities, such
as Guangzhou and Shanghai, the municipal Party committees effectively
took direct control over much of the cities’ heavy industry, despite
Party directives dictating that these industries be administered by
the central planning authorities. Meanwhile, the decentralized
enterprises (accounting for more than 85% of all employment in
Shanghai) were effectively given over to “direct control by municipal
Party committees,” which meant that “enjoying as they did ties with
local Party officials, enterprise Party committees gained control over
production tasks.” Down to the most basic units of urban life, the
policy was to “guarantee the absolute leadership of the Party in
industrial production.” Decentralization, then, actually represented
a stronger fusion of Party and state, as the tasks of everyday
production as well as setting output targets and reporting final
production numbers were all roundly handed over to Party committees
rather than technicians and managers.
An extreme example of this can be seen in the practice of several
factories in Guangzhou, which adopted “an anarchical policy of
‘non-management’ (wuren guanli).” This policy entailed that
enterprises “practiced the ‘Eight Selfs’ (ba zi), in which workers
arranged their own plans, output quotas, technology, blueprints,
operations, inputs of semiprocessed goods, quality inspection, and
accounting.” The practice became so extreme that banks “distributed
cash to any worker who came in with purchase orders. Employees who
knew the enterprise’s bank account number could withdraw funds to
procure whatever items they needed for their factories.” Yet, even
with the near-complete abolition of enterprise-level management and
with workers collectively agreeing upon their own production quotas,
all evidence suggests that these quasi-syndicalist factories suffered
the same output speculation as factories that retained more
traditional management structures. The ultimate effect of the
production crisis was not blunted in Guangzhou.
Quotes from Part III: Ossification: