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Abstract
The Cultural Revolution arguably was all about class and class struggle, which were enduring motifs throughout the Mao era. But what did class really mean, and how do we situate Mao’s “continuous revolution” in its historical context? Many scholars have argued that Mao’s project of continuous revolution, that is, the Cultural Revolution, was an active attempt to tackle the problem of the bureaucratic institutionalization of the Chinese Revolution and above all to forestall the rise of a new socialist ruling elite. This new-class interpretation of late Maoism and the Cultural Revolution is flawed in two crucial aspects. First of all, it overlooks the manifold ambiguities and incoherencies of the late Maoist ideology of class; and second, it fails to fully comprehend the political and ideological consequences of such ambiguities and fragmentariness as amplified by the specific historical and institutional context in which they were pragmatically received and enacted.
This paper begins with a brief discussion of the contradictions and ambiguities of the Maoist discourse of class. It then examines the political and ideological consequences of such ambiguities by focusing on the ramifications of the institutional codification of class in post-1949 China. Artificially constructing and perpetuating a social field of antagonism that had largely ceased to exist by the 1960s, the discourse of the state-imposed class-status system was superimposed upon an emergent language of class critical of bureaucratic inequalities, an inchoate language which became assimilated into the existing class discourse based on a rigid classification of prerevolutionary sociopolitical distinctions. This entanglement of disparate forms of class analysis and practice had profound consequences during the Cultural Revolution, as discourses about old and new class adversaries—each with distinct structures of antagonism and developmental dynamics—became hopelessly confused.
| Glossary | ||
| chengfen 成份 | = | |
| chou laojiu 臭老九 | = | |
| guanliao zhuyizhe jieji 官僚主义者阶级 | = | |
| Huang Yanpei 黄炎培 | = | |
| hukou 户口 | = | |
| jieji luxian 阶级路线 | = | |
| jiu ren 旧人 | = | |
| louwang zhiyu 漏网之鱼 | = | |
| niugui sheshen 牛鬼蛇神 | = | |
| Shengwulian 省无联 | = | |
| xuetong 血统 | = | |
Notes
1 Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: Contradictions among the People 1956–1957, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 1–2.
2 Franz Schurmann, “The Attack of the Cultural Revolution on Ideology and Organization,” in China in Crisis, eds. Ping–ti Ho and Tang Tsou (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 525–26.
3 I take the term from MacFarquhar and Schoenhals’ authoritative account of the Cultural Revolution. See Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
4 For high-level leadership conflicts over social and economic policies in the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution, see Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: The Coming of the Cataclysm 1961–1966, vol. 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
5 MacFarquhar, Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 1, 3.
6 Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1999), 302.
7 For a full discussion of these topics, see Yiching Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Class, Chinese Socialism in Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
8 Pang Xianzhi and Jin Chongji, Mao Zedong zhuan, 1949–1976 [Biography of Mao Zedong, 1949–1976], vol. 2 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2003), 834–35.
9 For several analyses of Mao’s theory of “continuous revolution,” see Graham Young and Dennis Woodward, “From Contradictions among the People to Class Struggle: The Theories of Uninterrupted Revolution and Continuous Revolution,” Asian Survey, vol. 18, no. 9 (1978), 912–33; Stuart Schram, “Mao Tse-Tung and the Theory of the Permanent Revolution, 1958–69,” The China Quarterly, no. 46 (1971), 221–44; and John B. Starr, Continuing the Revolution: The Political Thought of Mao (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
10 “Constitution of the Communist Party of China,” Peking Review, no. 35–36 (1973), 26.
11 For an attempt to reexamine the notion of “capitalist restoration” in the contemporary Chinese context, see Yiching Wu, “Reinterpreting ‘Capitalist Restoration’ in China: Toward a Historical Critique of Actually Existing Market Socialism,” in Culture and Social Transformation: Theoretical Framework and Chinese Context, eds. Tianyan Cao, et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 293–314.
12 Quoted in Andre Malraux, Anti-Memoirs (London: Rinehart & Winston, 1968), 386–87.
13 Arif Dirlik, Marxism in the Chinese Revolution (Lanham, MD: Ronan & Littlefield, 2005), 168.
14 Richard Kraus, Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 143.
15 Victor Nee and James Peck, “Introduction,” in China’s Uninterrupted Revolution, eds. Nee and Peck (New York: Random House, 1975), 51–52.
16 See Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957); Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972).
17 Richard Kraus, “Class Conflict and the Vocabulary of Social Analysis in China,” China Quarterly, no. 69 (1977), 63, italics added.
18 Maurice Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978–1994 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996), 49–51.
19 John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 384.
20 Michel Oksenberg, “Political Changes and Their Causes in China, 1949–1972,” The Political Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 1 (1974), 111–12.
21 Harry Harding, Organizing China: The Problem of Bureaucracy, 1949–1976 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981), 263.
22 MacFarquhar, Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 1, 199.
23 Ibid., 214. In interpreting Mao’s idea of “continuous revolution,” scholars sometimes disagree over issues concerning periodization. Lowell Dittmer, for example, wrote that in 1965 Mao had already developed the idea that a “bureaucratic class” was emerging; but it was not until a decade later that the incipient critique was “radicalized” and “systematized.” In contrast, Joseph Esherick argued that Mao’s thinking had “reached its final form” by 1964–65, and the theory of “capitalist restoration” had already been fully developed by the eve of the Cultural Revolution: “[The] ambiguities have largely been resolved by defining the origins of classes substantially in terms of power. … It points not so much to the realm of ideology as to the realm of power and authority—to the ‘bourgeois power holders’ so much under attack in the Cultural Revolution.” See Lowell Dittmer, “The Radical Critique of Political Interest, 1966–1978,” Modern China, vol. 6, no. 4 (October 1980), 363–96; and Joseph W. Esherick, “On the ‘Restoration of Capitalism’: Mao and Marxist Theory,” Modern China, vol. 5, no. 1 (1979), 64, emphasis original.
24 Graham Young, “Mao Zedong and the Class Struggle in Socialist Society,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 16 (1986), 62.
25 James T. Myers, Jurgen Domes, and Erik von Groeling, eds., Chinese Politics: Documents and Analysis, vol. 1 (Columbia, NC: University of South Carolina Press, 1986), 274.
26 Mao Zedong, Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao [Mao Zedong’s Manuscripts Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China], vol. 11 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1996), 265–66.
27 Myers, Domes, and Groeling, Chinese Politics: Documents and Analysis, vol. 1, 271, italics added.
28 Joel Andreas, “Battling over Political and Cultural Power During the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” Theory and Society, vol. 31, no. 4 (2002), 465, italics added; also see Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
29 Mao Zedong sixiang wansui [Long Live Mao Zedong Thought], vol. 4 (Wuhan, 1968), 31–2.
30 Mao Zedong, “Zai huijian A’erbaniya lingdaoren Xiehu shi de tanhua (zhaiyao)” [Abstract of Mao Zedong’s Conversation with Albanian Leader Mehmut Shehu] (5 May 1966), in Zhongguo wenhua dageming wenku [The Chinese Cultural Revolution Database], eds. Song Yongyi et al., 2nd ed. (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2006).
31 For two classic accounts of the CCP-led peasant movement, see William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Vintage Books, 1966); and David Crook and Isabel Crook, Revolution in a Chinese Village: Ten Mile Inn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959).
32 The urban bourgeoisie were initially treated more leniently. But as the Party’s class policy progressively hardened, former capitalists and their offspring were subjected to increasing stigmatization.
33 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 3.
34 For an example of residual bourgeois privileges, see Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai (New York: Grove Press, 1986). The author described her life as “an oasis of comfort and elegance” in the midst of a metropolis taken over by “proletarian realism,” until it was shattered by the Cultural Revolution. For the CCP’s efforts to ameliorate cultural and educational inequalities that resulted from prerevolutionary privileges see Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers.
35 Gordon White, The Politics of Class and Class Origin: The Case of the Cultural Revolution (Canberra: Contemporary China Center, Australian National University, 1976), 9.
36 According to policies issued in the early 1950s, expropriated landlords could change their class labels in five years—if they took part in physical labor and obeyed the law—and rich peasants could be reclassified after three years. Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi [CCCPC Party Literature Research Office], ed., Jianguo yilai zhongyao wenxian xuanbian [Selected Important Documents since the Founding of the PRC], vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1992–98), 406–7.
37 Deng Xiaoping, Deng Xiaoping wenxuan [Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping], vol. 1 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1989), 245–46.
38 Mao Zedong, “Letter to Huang Yanpei” (1956), in Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao, vol. 6, 255, emphasis original.
39 For a study of the Mao era in the Cold War context, see Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
40 For an account of class reappraisal in a North China village, see William Hinton, Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 357–60.
41 Quoted in Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 24.
42 Stuart Schram, “Classes, Old and New, in Mao Zedong’s Thought,” in Class and Social Stratification in Post-Revolutionary China, ed. James L. Watson (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 52.
43 For examples of the voluminous literature on Red Guard factionalism, see Andrew Walder, Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Shaoguang Wang, Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Stanley Rosen, Red Guard Factionalism and the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1982). For a recent study of violence during the Cultural Revolution, see Yang Su, Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
44 For mass demobilization and restoration of political order, see chap. 9 in Hong Yung Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Case Study (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978); and MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, chap. 14 and 15 in Mao’s Last Revolution.
45 For further discussion of this topic, see Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, forthcoming.
46 Song Yongyi and Sun Dajin, eds., Wenhua dageming he tade yiduan sichao [Heterodox Currents of Thought in the Cultural Revolution] (Hong Kong: Tianyuan shuwu, 1997), 278. For the Shengwulian episode in Hunan, see Jonathan Unger, “Whither China—Yang Xiguang, Red Capitalists, and the Social Turmoil of the Cultural Revolution,” Modern China, vol. 17, no. 1 (1991), 3–37. For heterodox political currents that emerged in the Cultural Revolution, also see Shaoguang Wang, “‘New Trends of Thought’ during the Cultural Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary China, vol. 8, no. 21 (1999), 197–217; and Yin Hongbiao, Shizongzhe de zuji: Wenhua dageming qijian de qingnian sichao [Footsteps of the Missing: Currents of Youth Thought During the Cultural Revolution] (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2009).
47 Song and Sun, 279.
48 For several informative accounts of these policy initiatives, see Joel Andreas, “Institutionalized Rebellion: Governing Tsinghua University During the Late Years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” China Journal, no. 55 (2006), 1–28; Dongping Han, The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008); John Cleverley, In the Lap of Tigers: The Communist Labor University of Jiangxi Province (Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield, 2000); and Mobo C. F. Gao, Gao Village: A Portrait of Rural Life in Modern China (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999).
49 Song and Sun, Wenhua dageming he tade yiduan sichao, 295.
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Yiching WU
WU Yiching teaches East Asian Studies, history, and anthropology at the University of Toronto. An anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago, his main scholarly interests involve the history, society, and politics of Mao’s China, in particular the Cultural Revolution. His book The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2014. He is currently working on two book-length projects about China’s late 1960s, on the demobilization of Cultural Revolution mass politics and the role of Mao respectively.