Traditional Chinese Social Structure, c. 1949

Land and laborVillage and clan

Why was land reform such a crucial question for the

revolutionaries?

Why was it so difficult?

Example: Gao village, (Hunan)

1949:• 280 mu (46 acres) for 20

households• 1 landlord, 45 mu (7.4 ac.)• 1 rich peasant, 33 mu (5.4 ac.)• Average middle peasant: 13.8 mu

(2.3 ac.)• Average poor peasant: 6 mu (1 ac.)

“Dig out the rotten root of

feudalism”• Who depends upon whom for a living?• Why are the poor poor and the rich

rich?• Should rent be paid to the landlords?(issues raised at organizing meetings

for land reform; Hinton, 1966: 128)

Why were these questions so

difficult?• Land and labor linked to clan

system• Clan structure shaped village life• Relative autonomy of clan/village

created basis of solidarity vs. outsiders, other clans and villages

• Religious ideology (esp. ancestor worship and Confucianism) supported clan structure

Clan power

• Small Gao village could unite with larger Gao village nearby

• Within clan, dominant branch or family could control more land

• “Feudal” exploitation obscured by religious ideology (Gao’s landlord taught Confucianism)

• Dilemma for communists: how to weaken this structure while maintaining peasant support

The People’s Republic

“We have stood up.”Mao Zedong to the Political

Consultative Congress, Sept. 11, 1949

What was the structure of the

new state?• “people’s democratic

dictatorship”– (“New Democracy”)• Control of key industries (like

social democracy-style socialism)• Democratic centralism in CCP• Democratic centralism in National

People’s Congress

State structure

• Party structure (Atlas, #21)• State structure (Atlas, #19)

State structure (simplified by

Shafer)

Chinese Communist Party

National Peoples Congress

People’s Liberation Army

People (in mass organizations, social institutions)

CPPCC

State Council

Judiciary

CPPCC org chart

Cadre system

• Inherited from Republic, which revised imperial structure

• Li: “state technocrats” (37)• Even more power under Jiang Jieshi• Includes (Li: 48):

– government officials – military officers – managers of state-owned or even large

private corporations – intellectuals

Immediate tasks:

• Land reform • Marriage law• “Resist America, Aid Korea” • Suppression of

counterrevolutionaries• Thought reform• Three-Anti’s and Five-Anti’s (anti-

corruption)

Why these campaigns?

How were they carried out?

What was the “deep

contradiction”?• Dietrich: institutional development

vs. revolutionary transformation– Bureaucracy vs. mass mobilization– Rationalization (development) vs.

emotion (revolutionary romanticism)

• Benson: nationalism and socialism

1953: Stalin dies

Socialist transition: First Five-Year Plan (1953-1957)

• Bourgeois stage “abruptly terminated”? (Meisner, p. 108)

• Soviet “aid”—with strings; loans with interest (Cf. Dietrich, p. 85, 87)

• Negative lessons from USSR collectivization

• Maoist “peasant socialism”: first, mutual aid teams, then “lower” Agricultural Producers Cooperatives (APCs), then…

First five-year plan

• Soviet aid actually minimal; 3% of total investment

• But “a drive based on the wholesale adoption of Stalinist methods” (Meisner: 109)

• Growth impressive; 1952-57 18% rate higher than goal (14.7%) (Meisner: 112-113)

• “a significant and stable modern industrial base” (ibid)

• But social and economic costs to peasants

Contradictions in First Five-

Year Plan• Two line struggle: Mao vs. “handwringers;”

collectivization vs. “deep” private property concept; “old revolutionaries” vs. “new cadres”

• “one-man management” vs. socialist “new man”• Bureaucratization vs. revolutionary

transformation• Also reflected in education: “indoctrination” vs.

bureaucratic elitism (examination system)

High Tide

• 1955: caution prevails in Politburo, APCs dissolved

• Mao goes to masses and lower levels, predicts “imminent” mass movement for socialism

• Cadres investigate, enthusiastic villages held up as examples

Relations vs. forces

• Mao: revolutionize relations of production first

• Forces of production will follow• Opponents argue forces first

Base-Superstructure

Superstructure

Ideas, ideology, institutions

Social reproduction

Social forces of production

Relations of production

Means of production

Class struggle Revolution

New superstructure

New forces of production

Socialist transition: High

Tide• Campaign turns to industry; even

more complete reorganization• By 1956, almost entire country in

socialist transition

Socialist transition: Hundred Flowers• Khruschev’s criticism of Stalin

opens new possibilities in Third International

• Mao, holding firmly to mass line, advocates “big democracy”—let one hundred flowers bloom

• “On the correct handling..“

Why the hundred flowers

campaign?• “A vast and routinized bureaucratic

apparatus…” (Meisner, 170)• Note the role of Liu Shaoqi and Deng

Xiaoping in the Party at that moment• Who does Mao turn to, to counter that?• Contradiction between leadership and

the led• Mao: “…question whether socialism or

capitalism will win is still not settled.”

One Hundred Flowers

Who turned the flowers into poisonous weeds?