(i) Restoring production

Between 1949 and 1953 the economy was restored. The government then began a programme of planned expansion, at the core of which – so far as workers were concerned – were sustained efforts to increase labour productivity. Accordingly a new set of regulations was introduced, the draconian Model Outline of Intra-Enterprise Discipline Rules. [1] The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) was required to publicize and assist in the enforcement of the new regulations. Article 17 of the rules reads “Late arrival or early departure without good reason, or playing around or sitting idle during working hours shall be subject to proper punishment or dismissal as the case may require.” Article 21 stipulates that: “If due to non-observance of working procedures or irresponsibility, rejects are turned out or the equipment is damaged, the worker or staff member shall be held responsible for part or whole payment of compensation for the material loss as conditions may require, whether he is punished or not. The amount of compensation shall be decided by the management and deducted from his wages until it is completely paid up, but the maximum amount to be deducted each time must not exceed 30 per cent of his actual monthly wages.”

As if this foreman’s charter (prosecution, judgement and jury were all in the same hands) were not enough, penalties were stipulated for managers who failed to punish the workers concerned. [2]

To ensure that workers with poor records could not escape particular managers by changing jobs, the Ministry of Labour introduced a labour book containing the worker s record; the worker could not obtain legal employment without presenting the book to his employer for inspection. Special tribunals were created in 1953 to enforce the disciplinary code, with the court of final appeal being the Supreme People’s Court. Under supervision by local courts, factory managements were required to set up internal courts with the power to make public criticism of the performance of particular workers, to warn them and to penalize them by cutting pay, demoting, suspending or dismissing them. For more serious charges, labour correctional camps were created; the ordinary courts took over after that, with the power to imprison or in extreme cases to impose the death penalty. [3]

The combined effects of poor machinery, poor health and the general speed-up in production created both high accident and sickness rates as well as forms of worker resistance. In response, the ACFTU undertook regular campaigns, not to protect workers by securing a slackening of the pace, but by intensifying discipline and setting up Union commissions to try offenders. The press complained regularly of labour “indiscipline”. One newspaper maintained that: “Workers in general are late for work and early to go home, and always absent without leave; they break working regulations, disobey transfer orders and technical instructions and resist the authorities negatively, causing. a fall in the quality of their work; sometimes they purposely go slow in their work or even stage a strike.” [4] The trade union newspaper explained: “Since a large number of the new workers who have been recruited by various enterprises come from the petty bourgeoisie or even from the exploiting classes, they brought many backward ideas such as selfishness, irresponsibility, and laziness.” [5] As so often, resisting the régime s purposes was attributed to hostile classes. In fact, by 1953 the rapid expansion in employment had not gone beyond taking up the existing unemployed.

The press also attacked go-slows and strikes. The People’s Daily summarized the irritation of the new government: “The phenomenon of idle strikes, insubordination and violation of labour discipline, are still prevalent among staff and workers in various enterprises, causing tremendous damage to our national economy.” [6]

The cadres were also guilty of not appiying the proper sanctions: “The leadership cadres in some of our departments and enterprises have cherished an erroneous conception of the problem of labour discipline, considering that strict implementation of discipline is a ‘capitalist way of management’, a ‘warlord style of work’, or ‘commandism’. Therefore they consciously or unconsciously adopt a compromising attitude towards acts of breach of discipline, nor do they take any drastic action against them.” [7]

The work performances criticized might have been tolerable had they not been measured against the spectacular output achieved by model workers, the “Stakhanovites”. “Stakhanovism” was a feature in the organization of labour in Stalin’s Russia. A miner, Alexander Stakhanov, claimed to have produced 102 tons of coal in five hours, fourteen times the normal output. This “model” was then employed to force all miners to compete to achieve the new – and clearly ludicrous – target, raising the norm progressively so that the average miner could never reach it but productivity went up by leaps and bounds. In China, the “model worker” concept was used from the beginning with the same aim. By the end of 1950, there were some 200 publicized national and several thousand provincial models as well as model enterprises; by 1958, there were five and a half million model workers. The Wang-chia-yuan colliery in Kiangsi province, for example, claimed to have broken the national record six times running (though the claims were subsequently said to be forged). [8]

In Western countries, “rate-busting” by individual workers is a notorious method of raising output, setting workers against each other, and ruining their health through exhaustion and accidents (it penalizes all except the most robust, especially women and older workers). But in China, Stalin’s formula was described as “socialist emulation”: “it transforms labour from a degrading and painful burden, into a matter of honour, glory, valour and heroism. [9]

Pay was geared to reward the rate-buster. There were numerous other privileges for model workers – titles, opportunities for promotion, attending conferences, being introduced to national leaders, opportunities to join the party or be elected to political or governmental bodies, special holidays in trade union rest homes, travel privileges, gifts in kind, and – perhaps the most important of all – special treatment in the provision of housing. Sometimes the rewards were not to individuals but to a gang or team. In the early 1960s, there was even a “family emulation drive” in which members of a family working in the same factory were supposed to check each other s shortcomings in order to keep up the family output. [10] There were also interplant contests, and the mass meeting was used to expose the laggards.

The model workers system proved a mixed blessing for the regime. Apart from the problem of forged credentials – workers and management colluding to win prestige – stable production was often wrecked by individual blitzkrieg tactics. Wang Jung-lun of the Anshan iron and steel complex was so far ahead in his work, he would have been halfway through the Fourth Plan while the rest of the work force was only completing the First, something of a problem if production is collaborative. [11] For different reasons, managers and workers had cause to be hostile to the scheme. Furthermore, model workers had an exceptionally high casualty rate, not a good advertisement for other workers; of 192 model workers discussed in one source, seventy-six later collapsed from overwork, and ninety others subsequently failed to make the political or moral grade. [12]

Efforts were made to lengthen the working day. However, the cost to men and machines was high. As a result, the original eight to ten hour day was revived, with, where possible, three-shift working. However, plant targets remained, often forcing managers to extend working hours well beyond the official period. In 1952 the government reproved the practice: “Under the slogan of ‘accomplishing the production mission’ and ‘implementing the economic accounting system’, the leadership personnel in certain factories demand an unlimited stretch of labour of the workers, extend their working hours, and encourage them to ‘throw themselves into the boiling water and burning flame’. For instance, the brick factory of Ma Chia Kou, Kailan, failing to keep up its production previously, mobilized workers to pull bricks out of the hot kiln heated to 130 degrees centigrade in order to fulfil its contract in time to avoid a fine ... The result was that forty-one of the forty-three workers sustained injury through burns, some proving fatal.” [13]

Despite the reproof, the pressure of targets – and the sanction of fines or worse – continued to force the pace. The press carried accounts of people working twenty-four hours or more at a stretch; one railway “hero” worked for thirty-nine hours continuously. At the Anshan steel works in 1955, it was reported that: “During a week in April, some workers in this enterprise worked as long as thirty-five hours at a stretch; others, seventeen hours.” [14] Even the head of the ACFTU, Lai Jo-yü, was prevailed upon to complain: “There has been no limit to the prolongation of working hours; individual workers have worked continuously for seventy-two hours through additional shifts and working hours. in order to fulfil their tasks, individual factories have required their workers to work Sundays for a period of ten months ... As a result of exhaustion, sickness and casualties have been serious ... in individual factories, increased shifts and working hours reached 260,000 hours, but the number of hours lost due to sick-leave amounted to 220,000.” [15]

The government also made continuing efforts to economize on manpower. In his 1958 Sixty Points on Working Methods Mao praised the amalgamation of Kwangsi commercial enterprises which cut their workforce from “2,400 to 350”. In the 1950s, jobs expanded rapidly enough to conceal the simultaneous decline in the volume of labour per unit of output. In the 1960s, output increased less rapidly, but there was no relaxation in the efforts to reduce the labour force. For example, at the Hsiao Ch’i-pa Iron and Steel Works (Chieng-yu county, Szechuan), the 1960 production plan was fulfilled one month ahead of schedule while the workforce was cut by a fifth; the management aimed to cut the workforce by another fifth in 1961, but then decided to raise the targets and drop a third of the workers. [16]

With tight curbs on labour costs, the appropriation by the State from current production was enormous. The Chairman of the ACFTU in 1954 reported that: “In 1952, the workers of State-operated enterprises produced a yearly average value of iMP 100 million per capita. Of this, except for iMP 500,000 as the average monthly wage for workers, ninety-four per cent represented capital created for the State.” [17]

The Great Leap Forward accelerated the drive to increase output and lower labour costs. The rules governing hours and conditions were swept away in the frenetic drive for expansion. Now even increased pay for increased output was denounced as capitalist “material incentives”. Military and guerilla imagery came to dominate production – model teams and Red Banner Bearers led “surprise attacks” in competition with other teams and factories; “combat corps” were mobilized for assaults under the slogan, “no respite without victory”. Tales of triumphs poured in – the cadres of Ku-hsien steel works, Shansi, claimed to have increased daily steel output from 714 to over 2,000 tons.

(ii) Wages

According to theory, under capitalism, wages induce people to work; they must work to secure the means of their survival. Differences in wages induce workers with different skills to take different jobs; the labour force is distributed between jobs. Differences in the profit margins between competing firms permit, in theory, different levels of wages, which induce workers to move from less to more profitable firms. The role of wages in distributing workers would be unnecessary if skills and abilities were universal or the nature of production required no skills. In a State-owned economy, subject to a central plan rather than different profit rates, if differences in wages are not used to distribute workers between jobs, it can only be done by decree, by instructing workers to do particular jobs, a task which requires a large directing bureaucracy. The discussion of wages in China must, therefore, include an account of how the Chinese government secures such a distribution of workers.

Both the Soviet Union and the United States had, during the main stages of capital accumulation, a relative shortage of labour, especially skilled workers, and in both countries, there was a sustained drive to the most intensive exploitation of labour with sharp differences in wages between workers. In China, like Japan and India, the supply of labour appears in the early stages of accumulation to be unlimited, although there is a grave scarcity of skilled labour. In Japan, this situation produced not the high and finely graded wage differences of the United States, but a small core of permanent workers alongside a very large workforce of temporary and contract workers; it was not so much the wage differences that were the mechanism for distributing workers, but differences in the security of employment. On coming to power the new Chinese régime made some efforts to copy a Russian style of wage payments (although it was never so extreme), but already by the mid-1950s was moving towards what we could call the “Japanese” model.

The subject of wages is much confused by the distinction between “material” and “non-material” incentives. It is said, in China, that working for money is “selfish”, and people should work for patriotism or a similar purpose. Employers in the West have not been at all averse to urging workers to “work for Britain”, and capitalism has always employed “non-material” incentives – usually negative (a fear of unemployment) but sometimes positive (patriotism, loyalty to a particular employer); there are other “non-material” incentives, of course, like the use of the law, police and troops to intimidate workers into working. There must therefore be some care about praising “non-material” incentives as if they were somehow superior, and confusing a situation where material scarcity has been abolished so that the basic drive – to secure material survival – is no longer paramount with one of great scarcity, where workers are not even paid in relationship to their work. In the second case, we are closer to forms of serfdom or military service (the second existing under capitalism) than communism.

We will look at incomes in China as a whole in the next section, but what was the picture of the wage system before the Cultural Revolution? Initially, the régime organized an eight grade wage point system, with fixed wage points related to skill, industry, area and job (the wage points were related to five staple items of consumption: grain, oil, salt, cloth and coal). The national range was not wide (3:1), but between industries and areas much wider. With the beginning of the First Plan, new priorities – of area and industry – were added; for example, a special bonus was given for metal working in Shanghai and Taiyuan (nine to ten per cent) and for Kansu petroleum workers (ten to thirty per cent). The government made consistent efforts to increase the proportion of pay made under piece-rate systems (at their maximum extension, piece rates were officially said to cover forty-two per cent of workers) and to widen differences in pay. Inequality of income was a deliberate act of policy – as Chou En-lai, quoting Mao (and Stalin), explained: “some confusion still exists, and, in many places, egalitarianism has not been overcome. Egalitarianism is a type of petty-bourgeois outlook which encourages backwardness and hinders progress. It has nothing in common with Marxism and a socialist system. It damps down enthusiasm of workers and employees in acquiring technical skill and raising productivity; it harms the growth of our economic construction. We must therefore oppose egalitarianism.” [18] The justification for inequality is not, here, seen as a temporary matter; equality is incompatible with a socialist system!

If the government strove to increase differentials, it was also concerned to minimize labour costs, particularly by eliminating payments which were not related to work performance. For example, from 1951, efforts were made to reduce the bonus customarily paid at the New Year. Drastic limits were laid down on the size of the bonus, and employees of the government and banks were forbidden to receive it. [19]

Despite inflation the expansion in jobs and increase in stability of employment after 1949 must have seemed to most workers a dramatic improvement. Wages did not rise much – one estimate suggests that the average wage in the early 1950s, about JMP 40-50, was not in real terms very different from the average in the early 1930s. [20] But there was now greater stability and, because more family members could expect to secure work, a higher level of household income, despite the increased level of deductions – for example, for State Bonds, Aid Korea Bonds, savings and fines. The beginning of the Plan imposed rigorous targets on managers and made the scarcity of skilled labour severe. Managers began to compete to secure skilled workers, bidding up top wage rates. In 1953, as a result the government seems to have lost control of the wage system, and only re-established some measure of guidance through a general tightening up of financial controls over managers.

In 1956 the government introduced the only major reform of the wage system under the People’s Republic. The aim was to restore incentives and differentials. “This revision”, an authoritative commentator argued, “will effectively eradicate egalitarianism and the state of unreasonableness and confusion obtaining in the current wage system [and] serve as a powerful material factor setting in motion the extensive masses of workers and office employees to strive for fulfilment of the First Five Year Plan ahead of schedule.” [21]

However, a straight rationalization would have had to include substantial wage cuts for many workers. Given the rash of industrial disputes mentioned earlier, and the resistance of party cadres in the factories to pay cuts, the government permitted wages to rise to secure the rationalization – by some twenty per cent on the former total wage bill. On the basis of the minimum wage needed to maintain two adults in an urban area – an innocent implementation of Marx’s “socially necessary wage” – eight new grades of pay were established, varying between different industries and eleven geographical areas (the variation was about thirty per cent). Piece rates and incentive bonuses were expanded at the same time. The lowest manual workers’ rates were kept down (and reduced even further in November 1957) to narrow the gap between rural and urban pay and so discourage peasant migration to the cities.

The State retained strict control over the total wage bill of the enterprise and the size of its workforce (controls weakened during the Great Leap Forward, were restored from 1961, and tightened during the Cultural Revolution). The eight grade system has governed the structure of wages up to the present, although there were minor adjustments in 1963 and 1971.

In the heyday of the system piece rates covered some forty-two per cent of the workforce, compared to a maximum of seventy-two per cent in Russia. During the Great Leap, the party attempted to lower labour costs at the same time as accelerating production; instead of raising the piece-rate norms, it began to move away from piece rates altogether. As one newspaper described it: “during the Great Leap Forward movement, workers voluntarily abolished the piecework system and extra pay for extra work system. People now work not eight hours, but ten hours, or even twelve hours. If work requires, they work throughout the night.” [22]

Nonetheless, in 1959 piece-rate payment systems still covered thirty-five per cent of the workforce. In 1960 the effort to substitute party discipline for cash payments was then reversed and efforts were made to restore cash incentives (although not necessarily through piece rates). A commentator described the problem in the mines: “some workers began to think that how much they worked made no real difference and relaxed their effort gradually.” It was found that the restoration of incentives radically reduced absenteeism and increased “work enthusiasm”. [23] However, there was no relaxation of the tight controls over the hiring and direction of labour as employment contracted in the disaster years of the early 1960s.

(iii) Welfare

What about the living standards of urban workers and their families? Wages are not the only factor in assessing this. The price of goods determines the real value of wages. Since 1949, official food prices have been held stable, and in some cases slightly reduced. Of course, official prices do not indicate whether foodstuffs are available at that price. Speculation in commodities and the smuggling of foodstuffs in the cities have been a periodic preoccupation of the newspapers, indicating that the black market has been important in the supply of goods not available through legal channels. Except in years of exceptionally poor harvest this applies less to the most tightly controlled agricultural product, grain, and more to horticultural foodstuffs (tomatoes, fruit) and meat, much of which is raised on private plots by the peasants and traded through rural free markets.

The official grain ration – varying with the type of work and age of the consumer – was in the 1950s relatively small, varying between twenty-five and fifty-five catties per month (12.5 to 27.5 kilograms). In 1953 it was estimated that the average adult required seventy-one catties per month, with an actual average consumption in 1954 of forty-nine catties. [24] Since the mid-1950s, the State procurement of grain has increased substantially, but at a rate not much faster than the increase in population, so that it is unlikely the grain ration has significantly increased. However, the supply of other foodstuffs – meat, eggs, milk, sugar and even edible oils – has improved, as has the stability of supply, so that the long queues from four or five in the morning seen in the big cities in the 1950s are less common today.

Housing has remained a problem. The housing stock was disastrously depreciated in the twelve years before 1949, and the new régime directed most of its investment into industrial production. In the 1950s, efforts were made to clear the slums in the largest cities and rebuild at standards which, however, were not met in subsequent years. Since the government has no national housing programme there is little information but it seems the addition to the housing stock was very small outside a few favoured areas. Standards were generally low – four or five persons per room – and some brand-new residential areas, lower. [25] In Taiyuan, for example: “Housing conditions of workers are deplorable. It is rather a common phenomenon that over twenty workers are crowded into one small room. One room, formerly a toilet, is now accommodating six workers. In a coal mine outside Taiyuan, 250 worker families are housed in 123 rooms. In one room (ten by ten feet) are housed three worker families. Most of the houses are leaking.” [26]

In the 1960s, with strict controls on the increase in the city population and on marriage (so controlling the rate of creation of new households and the demand for separate living quarters), housing policy was concentrated on building factory dormitories for single workers, six to eight persons to a room. In the new industrial areas, little provision was made for housing at all. Workers in the Taching oilfield started work living in tents or holes dug in the ground to escape exposure to frost; in the early 1960s mud huts were built by the workers in their spare time; now, with half a million people living there, “Even new houses have no running water, only outside toilets shared by a dozen or more families and communal bath-houses.” [27] This is “self-reliance” with a vengeance! No wonder the State is so proud of the surpluses which Taching has provided.

In the 1950s more was done to improve basic services in the big cities – electrification, water and sewage facilities, the provision of public latrines, bath houses, clinics and schools. Prices were kept low for those with the right to utilize them, primarily permanent employees in large-scale industry. Rents were held at four to five per cent of the worker’s income. It is not clear what the situation was for those outside this group – temporary workers not housed in dormitories, small plant workers, casual labour, or even those without jobs (widows, pensioners, etc.). In the 1950s, there is evidence of at least some rents varying, not with the wage packet, but with the quality of accommodation. In 1955, the Minister of Finance, Li Hsien-nien, complained about one housing project in the following terms: “The dormitories newly built for workers of the Tsitsihar Locomotive and Wagon Factory were beyond the means of workers because the rental on each flat ranged from JMP 18 to 41 per month, or two to six times higher than the old dormitories.” [28]

State and municipal expenditure on housing is so slight in relationship to need that enterprises and offices have generally built housing for their own staff. This system of “tied cottages” gives great power to management and party cadres, and the allocation of housing can become one of the rewards for good behaviour. It also means that loss of job can entail, if not exile to a rural area, loss of the worker’s home. However, the system affects only the minority employed in enterprises employing 100 or more workers (possibly a quarter of the sixty million or so employed outside agriculture). For the rural majority, there is no central housing provision; traditional “self-reliance” must make up the gap.

The same minority is the recipient of the welfare services provided by the trade unions – canteens, clubs, housing, medical facilities, sanatoria, nurseries, and pensions. Half the cost of medical care for dependents of permanent workers is also met. Some factories provide schools for workers’ children, as well as “spare-time universities” for their parents. Social insurance benefits are graded according to wages, with special rights for model workers, combat heroes and others. Sickness benefit varies between sixty and 100 per cent of the wages received, provided the sickness or accident can be attributed to the worker’s employment. Retirement pensions are some fifty to seventy per cent of the average wage received at retirement (seventy per cent for those who have worked at the same place for more than fifteen years). By 1960 some nine million workers were covered by the scheme. Trade union activities are financed by management deducting three per cent from the total wage bill; cases are mentioned in the press of a much higher proportion being deducted by the cadres and distributed as and to whom they think fit. [29]

For permanent workers in larger enterprises conditions are adequate without being lavish. The standard of living depends very much on the seniority of the head of the household and the number of household members who are working. For example, in 1972 the Chinese press quoted with approval the case of the family of an elderly chemical worker (working, incidentally, three years after the official retirement age): Chang Tien-cheng, aged sixty-three, of Hsiku district, Lanchow. Formerly, he had been an odd-job man, “and no matter how hard he toiled at that time, he could not feed his family of five”. Presumably, the children were not of working age. “They had to eat wild plants from time to time ... Now, having five workers, the family income has risen while the cost of food grain, fuel and utilities and rent is stable or lowered. The family now has a flat in an apartment building. Rent and utilities cost less than one-eighteenth of the father’s wage. They had a gas stove installed that costs one yuan per month ... everyone who is working in a factory has a watch. The family possessions include two radio sets, three bicycles, a sewing machine, wool blankets, fur-lined coats and furniture.” [30]

After an extensive visit to China, Richman calculated the number of labour days required at present Chinese wages to purchase some of the items Chang Tien-cheng’s family owns. We can compare them with how long it takes a British worker to earn enough to make the same purchases (the figures in brackets): five to six days for a watch (half to one day); between twenty-five and fifty days for a wireless (one day); between thirty and fifty days for a two-piece woollen suit (two to three days); between sixty and ninety days for a bicycle (three and a half days); 165 to 425 days for a television set (seven days); 12,000 days for a car, if permitted (155 days). [31]

The condition of the permanent workers has improved considerably since the period of Kuomintang rule (and more dramatically by comparison with the years of civil war). But the improvement is mainly from stability of employment and the increased number of jobs available, rather than changes in pay or prices or government investment in public services. For the majority of workers conditions remain austere.

(iv) Unemployment

The rapid economic expansion of the first half of the 1 950s brought into employment much of the reserve army of urban labour. But the increased labour productivity of these years meant also that, as output soared, the number of new jobs tended to decline. In the first eight years of the People’s Republic, the number of industrial workers increased by fifty-one per cent; but in the period of the First Five Year Plan (1953-7), the number increased by only five per cent. Simultaneously, bureaucratic jobs grew more rapidly than those in industry, the result of extending State control. In China, the movement of peasants to the city also remained a problem, and put increasing pressure on State procurements of grain from the countryside.

By 1955, initial optimism that industrial growth would quickly eliminate unemployment was waning. The Chairman of the State Planning Council postponed a remedy for several years: “The phenomenon of unemployment left over from the old China cannot be completely eliminated yet, and the surplus labour force still cannot be fully utilized. These problems will have to be solved by our continued efforts in the Second or even the Third Five Year Plan.” [32]

The policies designed to remedy this situation – from banning rural immigration, rationing and passed, to increasing rural work – have already been discussed. However, rural disaster still produced a flight to the cities – for example, the Minister of the Interior complained that over half a million peasants had fled from famine areas to the cities in six months in l957. [33] Every slackening in the industrial economy, as in 196 1-6, threatened to re-create the old pool of urban unemployment unless hsia fang (sending down) worked with great speed and efficiency.

Despite the physical removal of the unemployed, the panoply of controls and propaganda, the attraction of the cities remained strong. The Minister of Agriculture remarked to a cadre audience in 1966 that: “Everyone wants to go to the towns. There a man can earn thirty to forty yuan a month just by sweeping the streets, whereas in the country he can earn no more than twenty yuan a month. Among those present here, who would voluntarily become peasants?” [34] The pressure was not simply from the peasants. Those “sent down” were frequently eager to return, whether with a job or not, and the weakening of police controls in 1966 led to a large influx of people to the cities.

Officially, the problem of unemployment in China is at an end, and in the cities, depending on the efficiency of the police and administrative controls, this is broadly true. It does not, of course, mean that the permanent city worker is relieved of the worry of redundancy; redundancy now can mean exile from the city to the countryside, with a sharp drop in the standard of living. However, isolating the urban economy in this way creates, when industry expands, a different problem: an artificial scarcity of labour. Managers, under the pressure of sanctions if they fail to meet the plan targets, are obliged to defy the regulations and pay their skilled workers above the going rate to prevent them moving to other enterprises for higher pay (a movement which is illegal, but which would require a vast police and administrative structure to prevent); and by hiring workers illegally either from the casual labour force in the city or from adjacent rural areas. In such circumstances, the government has been once again in danger of losing control. It has needed a method of making temporary cheap labour available if it is to safeguard its authority and sustain State accumulation. This has been achieved, as we shall see in the next chapter, by the system of temporary and contract labour.

In the rural areas, constant efforts are needed to keep up the level of employment, particularly when the State concentrates its attention on modern industry and urges the rural areas to be “self-reliant”. The problem is severe. The working-age population of China has increased by about twenty to twenty-five million people per year on average since the early 1960s. Not all of them are looking for jobs – some continue in education, some marry and leave the labour force to raise children, some go into the armed forces; and so on. If we assume, fairly generously, that ten to fifteen million new jobs are needed every year to keep up the present level of employment, we get some idea of the problem. If the industrial economy is expanding, there may be half a million new urban jobs created each year. For the rest, the rural areas have to feed them and find things for them to do without permitting them to strengthen the forces of petty capitalism. There is little room to manoeuvre.

(v) Trade unions

What should be the role of trade unions – organizations supposedly designed to defend the interests of workers – in a State embodying the interests of the working class, “led by the proletariat”? In Russia, there was no definitive answer in the early years. The exigencies of the period of War Communism led to the subordination of the unions to military imperatives. But in the retreat of the New Economic Policy, there was considerable debate over the question. One group, whose most prominent spokesman was Leon Trotsky, continued to defend the position of the party during the phase of War Communism; workers needed no defence against their own State, and therefore the trade unions should be instruments to achieve the production targets of the proletarian State. At the other extreme, the “Workers’ Opposition” argued that, since the trade unions embodied directly the essential interests of workers, the unions should take over the control of production and, indeed, the State itself. [35]

The two arguments ignored the complexities of the new régime – in a backward country with a minority working class, they were, in Lenin’s term, “abstract”. The Soviet Government, in fact, directed not a “Workers’ State”, but a “Workers’ State with bureaucratic distortions”. [36] The distortions’ entailed that the unions had a definite role, independent of the aims of the State: “Our present State is such that the entirely organized proletariat must protect itself, and we must utilize these workers’ organizations for the purpose of protecting the workers from their own State and in order that the workers’ organizations may protect our State.” Lenin’s formulation implied the right of the unions to use what strength they had against the State, to strike, in order to defend their members. Up to 1928, this was indeed the case, although bureaucratization led in practice to the suppression of many strikes. [37]

In the first years of the People’s Republic, there was no debate on the role of the trade unions. Their role had been defined in the preceding period in the Liberated Areas; they were instructed to assist in meeting the production targets of the State; Mao, like Stalin, apparently adhered unquestioningly to the position advanced by Trotsky in 1920. The ACFTU whose claimed membership rose from 800,000 in 1945 to thirteen million in 1955 and sixteen million in 1958, had the role of its affiliated unions specified by law: “To educate and organize the masses of workers and staff members to support the law and regulations of the People’s Government ... to adopt a new attitude to labour, to observe labour discipline, to organize labour emulation campaigns and other production movements in order to ensure the fulfilment of the production plans ... to protect public property ... to promote in privately owned enterprises the policy of developing production and of benefiting both capital and labour.” [38]

There was nothing about defending the interests of workers, nor about any rights the unions might have in this pursuit. Li Li-san, concurrently vice-president of the ACFTU and Minister of Labour, left no ambiguity: “the central task of the trade union organizations is to increase production. Only in this way will the trade unions be able to take fully into consideration the interests of the working class.” [39] Contrary to Lenin’s view, there was no difference between the interests of workers and the production targets of the State (a view usually espoused by employers in capitalist countries); only later was the halfway house of a “non-antagonistic contradiction” constructed to shelter strikes. Those entrusted with the achievement of production targets were the managers, and it followed that there was no difference between the interests of workers and managers. Indeed, since managers worked, they too ought to be members of trade unions; managers were frequently prominent in the unions as delegates at the annual conferences. It was the party which encompassed all, workers, managers and unions. In like fashion, the party appointed the trade union leadership from its own ranks, not from those with experience of workers or trade unions (let alone permitting the election of trade union leaders by union members).

In such circumstances, it was difficult for workers to distinguish trade union officials from management. From time to time senior party leaders complained of the resulting isolation of union officials; in 1950, for example, one military authority observed that: “Many of the factory trade unions have recently adopted the position of the capitalists, issuing the same slogans, speaking the same language, acting like them. The unions defend management ... In certain factories the capitalists could have accepted the demands of the workers, but the union proceeded to convince them to withdraw these demands ... in the coal mines of Ta Hae, the workers, when they learned of the dismissal of the union chairman, were as joyful as if they had learned of the liberation of Taiwan or a rise in wages.” [40] The reproach was unkind, since the luckless cadres were doing no more than carrying out the instructions of the party leadership.

Party cadres working in the unions had the unenviable task of trying to retain the confidence of workers (important for their political duties), while ensuring that production targets were met. If too much was conceded, the cadres were liable to be dismissed for “economism”, giving in to the “sectional and one-sided interests” of the working class. Li Li-san and his associates (a third of the ACFTU’s executive) were criticized and removed from union leadership for holding the view that “management should represent the long-term interests of the whole, while the trade union side should represent individual and immediate interests; management should represent production, while the trade union side should represent distribution.” [41]

Li Li-san had had no recent experience of trade union work (he spent the years of war and civil war in Moscow), and his replacement, Lai Jo-yü was even less experienced (he was a provincial party leader). A comparable sequence of events overtook Lai in 1957, although he was preserved from disgrace by his death the following year. In the unsettled conditions of 1956-7, Lai advanced the idea that local trade union branches should be responsible to the national trade union leadership rather than to factory or district party leaderships. [42]

The ACFTU despatched study teams to examine relations between union branches and local party committees; in the final report, it was concluded that nowhere were the two separate. The report of the deputy director of the ACFTU General Office went further, saying the workers had “cast aside” the unions because their sole function was to co-operate with management; the trade union officials were known to the workers as “the tongues of the bureaucracy, and the tails of the administration and the Workers’ Control Department”. [43] The local official, it was said, did nothing about bad working conditions or excessive hours; he was afraid to raise the complaints of workers lest the administration attack him as a trouble-maker. One cadre complained: “I am told that I should study the problems with the leadership and not with the masses, and that to talk with the masses means ‘becoming the tail of the masses’ ... I am regarded as a trouble-making Party member.” [44] The trade union party cadre was the lowest in the party hierarchy, and few above him would listen to complaints. If he mobilized workers against the management, he would be sacked and expelled from the party. The party members among the workers – between ten and twenty per cent of workers and staff in 1956 – were hostile to the trade union cadre and sometimes were not even members of the union; those that were, did not attend union meetings, report or pay dues. [45]

The party centre again intervened to settle the question: the local union branch was to be directed by the local party committee, a position which left no role for the national union leadership except as a propaganda arm of the party centre. [46] When Lai Jo-yü fell ill in 1958, Liu Ning-yi who worked in the foreign affairs department of the party Central Committe was appointed to replace him and undertook a purge of Lai’s associates lest they harbour secret ambitions to create autonomous unions.

No one questioned the idea that the role of the unions was to maintain production and implement the directives of the State. The unions played no role at all in the labour agitation in the mid-1950s. In general Mao displayed no interest in the unions, but when he did, it was to repeat that “the principal task of a trade union is to develop production.” [47] His constitution for the Anshan Iron and Steel Company makes no mention of unions.

The unions – like management, of which the local union leadership was part – retreated into the background during the Great Leap. The party committee assumed the leading position. In the retreat, the unions were resuscitated as part of the effort to save production and stabilize activities. There was no question of this role involving an independent defence of workers. The trade union newspaper repeated the official line: the local union must strengthen its unity with management for its “basic task is the same – to run socialist enterprises successfully by relying on the masses for fulfilling the tasks assigned by the Party and the State”.

However, in the first year of the Cultural Revolution, the trade unions were unilaterally abolished, along with the trade union newspaper and the Ministry of Labour. None of the claimed millions of union members protested (the main functions of the local unions in welfare and education continued to be fulfilled). The party explained that the unions were dominated by “revisionists’” who concentrated solely on production and the “economist” demands of workers, instead of “production, livelihood and education in one with production as the centre”, a formula notable for its obscurity. [48] The old unions were not resuscitated.

Yet the labour force required organizing for particular purposes. From 1967 the revolutionary committees began to sponsor local worker congresses for political education and “combating self-interest”. By 1973, these had moved into district or provincial congresses in major centres, the preparation for a reconstructed ACFTU.

In the early days of the régime, unions had been involved in wage negotiations with private employers, and on occasions were even able to claim that they had “corrected the mistaken activities of management”. But the elimination of the private sector ended this. From 1957 the government tightened its control of jobs and the wage bill, removing as much discretion as possible from local management, let alone union officials. Today, the national government determines the wage bill, and the unions have no role even in distributing wages within the plant. The trade union function is restricted to educational and welfare activities, and only where unions exist – in the large plants of advanced industry. Thus, Chinese unions are not “trade unions” at all in the ordinary sense, but rather the welfare departments of management (the role of factory committees will be discussed later).

Notes

1. Kuang-ming JP, 28 August 1953

2. JMJP, 14 July 1954, SCMP 859, cited Gluckstein, op. cit., p.216

3. For details and Chinese sources, cf. Martin King Whyte, Corrective Labour Camps in China, Asian Survey, March 1973, pp.255-6

4. Hsin-hua JP, 22 July 1953

5. Kung-jen JP, 3 June 1953

6. JMJP, 12 December 1954. See also JMJP, 3O March, 6 June, 20 August 1954

7. JMJP, 22 October 1954, SCMP 922

8. Chang-chiang JP, Hangkow 11 August 1952

9. Quoted, Seventh Congress ACFTU, ACFTU, Peking 1953, p.56

10. See, for example, four family members in Tientsin No.1 Dyeing and Weaving Mill, cited by Liu Pang-chieh, Family Emulation Drive, China Reconstructs, October 1961, pp.17-18

11. JMJP, 1 January 1954, cited Howe, Wage patterns, op. cit., p.131

12. Kung-jen JP, 19 April 1951

13. GAC (Committee for People’s Supervision), Circular on labour accidents, 18 September 1952, NCNA Peking, 17 September 1952, SCMP 446

14. Kung-jen JP, 27 May 1955, SCMP 1076

15. Kung-jen JP, 20 February 1955, SCMP 1024

16. JMJP, 12 March 1961

17. JMJP, 13 December 1954, SCMP 709

18. Report on the work of the government, First National People’s Congress, first session, 23 September 1954, p.27; cf. also The incompatability of socialism and egalitarianism, JMJP, 14 September 1952, SCMP 472

19. GAC, Directive on the year-end double pay and bonus in public and private enterprises, 8 December 1951, NCNA Peking, 8 December 1951

20. Gluckstein, op. cit., p.253

21. Chin Lin, Lao-tung, No. 3, 6 March 1956, cited by Charles Hoffman, Work incentive practices and policies in the People’s Republic of China, 1953-1965, New York 1967, p.85

22. Hu Shang, Speaking of the Government Issue System, JMJP, 13 November 1958, cited Hoffman, Work Incentives, op. cit., pp. 96-7; cf. also Li Fu-chun, Report on the draft economic plan for 1960, JMJP, 31 March 1960

23. Wang Yu-ch’ang, Attend to the livelihood of workers, JMJP, May 1960, cited Hoffman, op. cit., p.105

24. JMJP, 3 November 1955

25. Po I-po: “217,500 rooms were built to accommodate about one million people” in 1952 – NCNA Peking, 20 February 1953

26. Hsin-hua JP, 12 January 1952, cited Far Eastern Economic Review, 30 October 1952

27. Report of a visitor to Taching, Forming Maoist Man, Financial Times, London, 2 December 1976

28. NCNA Peking, 23 October 1954

29. For examples and Chinese sources, cf. Howe, Wage Patterns, op. cit., p.126

30. Living standards of Chinese workers rise, NCNA Lanchow, 11 May 1972

31. Calculations for China by Barry M. Richman after an extensive visit to China, average wage assumed, 60 yuan per month; cf. Industrial Society in Communist China, New York 1969, pp. 808-9; British wage assumed, £65.00 per week.

32. Li Fu-ch’un, cited by Wang Ya-nan, Ko hsueh ch’u pan-she, Peking 1956, cited Hoffman, The Chinese Worker, Albany (New York) 1974 p.50.

33. Takung Pao, Peking, 3 June 1957, SCMP, 24 June 1957, p.23

34. Tan Chen-lin, cited in Red Flag of Science and Technology, 6 March 1967, and by Deleyne, op. cit., p.58

35. This is a much simplified account of the debate; for a description, cf. R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, Cambridge, Mass. 1960, Ch.5, pp.119-36

36. The trade unions, the present situation and the mistakes of comrade Trotsky, December 1920, speech to 8th Congress of Soviet Trade Unions, SW 9 (1937), p.9

37. Strikes in the State sector affected 192,000 workers (1922); 165,000 (1923) when 1,592,800 were in dispute; 43,000 (1924); 34,000 (1925); 32,900 (1926); 8,900 (first half of 1928) – from Wage Labour in Russia, Moscow (in Russian), 1924, p.160, and Trade Unions in the USSR, 1926-28, Moscow (in Russian), 1928, p.358, cited by T. Cliff, Russia. A Marxist Analysis, London, n.d., pp.20-21

38. Trade Union law of the PRC, Peking, 1950, p.5

39. Speech, 8th meeting, Central People’s Council, 28 June 1950, included ibid, p.22

40. Teng Tzu-hui, vice-chairman, Southern-Central Military and Administrative Committee, Chung Kuo Kung Jen, Peking, 4 August 1950

41. Resolution on ACFTU work, summarized in Kung-jen JP, 11 February 1953

42. Kung-jen JP, 9 May 1957, SCMP 1535, p.12

43. Li Hsiu-jen, in JMJP, 4 August 1957, SCMP 1551, pp.10-13

44. Lo Yü-wen, Distressing contradictions, JMJP, 21 May 1957, SCMP 1551, pp.21-22

45. Report on the railways in T’ieh-lu Kung-jen, Canton, 4 May 1957, p.2, cited by Paul Harper, The party and the unions in Communist China, CQ 37, January-March 1969, p.111

46. Trade Unions open debate on two lines, NCNA Peking, 28 November 1957, SCMP 1665, pp.40-42

47. In the course of criticizing Soviet trade unions for paying too much attention to the welfare problems of workers – in Miscellany II, p.274

48. Ta-lien-wei, JMJP, 27 May 1968, SCMP 10 July 1968, p.5

In China, as in Japan and other countries, employers safeguarded their profits against fluctuations in business activity by employing a large part of their workforce on a temporary basis. In a boom, they took on temporary workers, and in a slump, laid them off. The “permanent” workers were those who, by reason of skill, experience or personal favour of the management were kept on in a slump. Apart from relative security of employment, the permanent workers usually received higher pay, better conditions and other benefits. Often permanent workers were city born and bred (and had received more education and possibly an apprenticeship training), while the “temporaries” were former peasants who had moved to the city in search of work, returning to the village when they were dismissed. Some groups of rural workers moved seasonally to the cities. In both China and Japan, some of these temporary workers were contracted for fixed periods of time; for example, parents would sell their daughters to textile mill owners for three to five years. Labour brokers would recruit gangs of rural workers for set tasks in plantations or on the roads. In some cases, the “recruitment” was little more than conscription by the State for its construction or maintenance work on roads, dams, irrigation channels and so on. We have seen how in the late 1930s the Kuomintang conscripted labour for major road, rail and airfield construction. In pre-revolutionary France, the “corvée” the feudal obligation to work for a set period on the King’s highway, was one of the most hated duties imposed on the peasants.

In China, temporary and contract work of this kind was regarded as one of the most vicious forms of oppression. The Communist party at its Second Congress in 1922 condemned the practice and promised to abolish it. The party recognized the political dangers of a division between permanent and temporary workers, with the unscrupulous only too willing to divert the attention of rural workers from employers to their permanent co-workers, and to appeal to permanent workers to fasten their hostility not upon the capitalists but upon the poor down-trodden rural immigrant. The rural workers who came to the city could be used in exactly the same way as immigrants are used in the industrialized countries today - a pool of cheap labour in a boom, and the scapegoat for the failure of the ruling order in conditions of slump, a tactic excellently designed to divide the opposition and set them at each other’s throats.

The change of régime in China did not dissolve the objective conditions which had created the temporary labour system. Indeed, the policy of restricting the city population, producing in a boom conditions of labour scarcity, made the need for some sort of comparable system even more urgent. From the foundation of the People’s Republic, it seems, temporary workers were tolerated (although it is not clear whether they were permitted in the cities in the 1950s). During the Cultural Revolution, it was alleged that temporary labour had been used for seventeen years [49], that there were 2.4 million such workers in 1957, and that, under the impact of the Great Leap Forward, this figure rose to twelve million (that is over a quarter of all workers and staff employed outside agriculture at that time). Such workers were not included in the plan estimates for labour, and were used as a buffer by managers and cadres in sudden spurts to meet changes in target deadlines. They were paid much less than permanent workers and received none of the fringe benefits (housing, medical and educational facilities, holidays, pensions, bonuses or allowances). [50] Sometimes their wages were paid from “miscellaneous expenditure” funds to keep their employment concealed from the State. As in capitalist countries, the construction industry with its unstable seasonal pattern of work had a high demand for such workers; illegal immigrants could get work without questions being asked, and so secure a niche in the city. In the 1950s private labour brokers recruited in the villages for city enterprises, and also found jobs for those who were unemployed in the city, criminals, ex-prisoners and so on.

In the early 1960s, the use of temporary labour became more widespread, and was formalized in various State-guided contracts by which the government could regulate the scale of employment and tighten up the financial administration of enterprises. An extension of municipal boundaries in 1962 to include large tracts of the countryside brought a large pool of rural labour under city administration. By 1964, temporary workers were being used not only in seasonal agriculture and construction, but in mining, agricultural processing industries, cotton gins, textiles, timber, power generation, road construction and maintenance, post and telecommunications and commerce. [51] It was also becoming clear that, unlike the general situation under the Kuomintang, temporary labour in the People’s Republic was being used systematically to displace permanent workers, to dilute the labour force.

The “system” was publicized as a fundamental break with capitalist labour practices, and a gigantic step forward in the abolition of what Mao saw as one of the Three Great Differences of capitalism surviving in China - the contradiction between town and country. Under the “worker-peasant system”, permanent city workers would be “sent down” to the countryside (where they would receive none of the benefits of being city workers, at considerable savings in labour costs to enterprise and municipality) and young peasants would come into the city to work on temporary contracts (without receiving any of the material benefits of being permanent city workers, again with considerable savings on costs to enterprise and municipality). In the Chinese press, the “worker-peasant system” was lauded as an exemplary instance of “putting politics in command” and “following Mao Tse-tung thought”.

The savings in labour costs were considerable. On a Hunan road maintenance scheme, Ch’ao-shui commune was paid RMB 150 per kilometre per year for a stretch of seventeen and a half kilometres of local highway - RMB 187.5 per worker employed on the task for the commune, RMB 126 for the worker’s production team, and RMB 36 for the worker himself. The work was not full time, but even then, RMB 36 for a year’s work compared very favourably for the régime with a month’s full-time work from a permanent city worker at RMB 50-60. [52]

The press was lyrical in praise of the virtues of these arrangements - it improved the roads; contributed to commune income: “the rural labour force is put to rational use [i.e., underemployment was reduced] ... State expenditures are reduced, and the supply of commodity grain is decreased [i.e., where the team fed the workers, the State did not have to supply grain].” [53] Some 4,500 people had worked on such schemes in the region, and in comparison to the time when only permanent road workers were employed, “this represents a saving of 100,000 yuan in wages, and 400-500 catties of commodity grain.” However, the writer warned authorities who might like to copy the scheme, that the workers must be carefully selected, politically sound, physically healthy, and “between eighteen and forty years old”.

Finance and trade departments were also urged to adopt the system. In this case, “in order to cut down the State supply of commodity grain, the worker-peasant labourers who work in the basic level units of finance and trade departments must provide their own food rations, and the State will supply a part as subsidy only when it is necessary to do so.” [54] Cadres were instructed to ensure that “the quality of commodities and services is improved and the cost of production and the cost of circulation are cut down without increasing the total amount of wages.” The aim, the writer argued, was to create useful work in slack seasons and at slack times of the day, involving all rural inhabitants: “The subsidiary labour power of the aged and children and the idle labour power in the rural areas may also be utilized.” He outlined the schemes to be employed, including the fact that in some cases, “the finance and trade departments pay for labour in kind (fertilizers, animal power, animal fodders).” Such schemes were necessary “because objective economic development demands that the differences between workers and peasants and town and country be gradually diminished through the introduction of the worker-peasant system.”

The People’s Daily gave considerable prominence to this new “higher type of social organization of labour”. In the Anyuan coal mines in Kiangsi (total labour force, 2,000 in 1965) 207 permanent - and older - miners had been “sent down” to a rural area, and 207 rural recruits, aged on average twenty-four years, had replaced them in 1965. The cadres hoped that, in five years, they would have achieved the complete turnover of the entire labour force (that is, the complete end of any permanent employment). During the winter season of 1965-6, sugar refineries were able to lay off 7,800 permanent workers so that “the State has saved wages amounting to 2.5 million yuan.” The savings were further increased because the temporary workers did not bring - or, at the wage received, could not bring-their families with them, so food and housing costs were very low (the same discovery was made by European employers - if immigrants could be separated from their dependants, the returns were vastly increased). The Chengtu Storage and Transport Corporation in December 1965 employed 172 permanent workers, and contracted with fifteen communes for 800 temporary workers for warehouse loading work, “Because the commune members come when there is work, leave after having done their work, and ask for no food and living quarters from the corporation, it was possible to save for the State a sum of more than 270,000 yuan.” The People’s Daily argued that “various production teams near the warehouses can earn more income for the collective and solve the problem of the blind outflow of manpower owing to insufficient farmland.” In yet other cases, the savings were made simply by reclassifying the permanent workers as temporary; in four mechanized sugar refineries, the State saved RMB 108,000 in wages and 132,000 catties of commodity grain by reclassifying 629 permanent workers in 1965. [55]

It is inconceivable that such a far-reaching change, widely publicized and much praised in the press, could have been introduced without the support of the party leadership. None of them - including Mao - criticized the system. Indeed, the particular way in which it was justified - as abolishing one of the Three Great Differences - suggests that the “worker-peasant” system might have been inspired by Mao himself. Until the end of 1966, through the upsurge of the Red Guards and their assault on all manner of malpractices, in the successive defining rules and documents of the Cultural Revolution, there was no mention of the condition and problems of temporary workers. Indeed, at one stage, it seemed as if an extension of the system might be one of the aims of the Cultural Revolution. When Canton radio, on 13 August 1966, broadcast instructions for implementing Mao’s directives for the Cultural Revolution, the worker-peasant system was cited as a prime example of “politics in command”; all suitable enterprises in the province should introduce it, gradually turning “a number of permanent workers into worker-peasants”, moving selected industries (particularly agricultural processing) to rural areas to utilize rural manpower, sending industrial workers to assist in farming and so on. [56]

A setback to the enthusiasm - or, at least, complacency - of the leadership was provided by the outbreak of worker militancy in late 1966. It is possible that efforts by the cadres to extend the “worker-peasant” system was one factor in instigating worker agitation. A number of different demands coincided - of permanent workers for the restoration of bonuses and allowances abolished earlier; of temporary workers for the payment of back wages (presumably held to keep the workers obedient for the period of the contract) and an equalization of conditions with permanent workers; of apprentices for a general improvement; and of workers and students “sent down” for a legal return to city employment.

Red Guards had begun to raise the issue of the conditions of temporary workers in September l966. [57] Both temporary and permanent workers were laid off in November in a number of plants (for reasons that are not clear), and they sent delegations to Peking to complain to the government. In the charged atmosphere of the time, the centre had little alternative but to authorize their reinstatement and the payment of back wages to temporary workers. This seems to have provided the basis for general demands for the payment of wages with-held, bonuses removed, and for the return of jobs. Late in the month, the centre announced an extension of the Cultural Revolution to farms and factories (but in carefully circumscribed terms) and warned managers not to retaliate to criticism by sacking workers or with-holding pay.

Simultaneously, posters in Canton alleged that a delegation of temporary and contract workers had been received by Chiang Ch’ing and the Cultural Revolution Group of the Central Committee of the party. [58] Chiang Ch’ing, Mao’s wife, is said to have denied that Mao had any knowledge of the conditions of temporary and contract workers, and placed responsibility for the system on Liu Shao-ch’i, the Ministry of Labour and the ACFTU. Shanghai posters reported that Chou En-lai showed greater courage on the question, arguing that “because of the circumstances in China”, it was necessary to retain the system.

Chiang Ch’ing’s accusation - that it was all the fault of Lui Shao-ch’i - sanctioned the agitation of Red Guards, Red Rebels and the temporary and contract workers themselves. In Shanghai, the rebels declared: “Liu Shao-ch’i is the chief culprit”, and “the system of temporary workers and contract workers means capitalist relations of production between employer and employee ... [and is] absolutely incompatible with our country’s socialist system.” [59] The case of a Shanghai Fodder Work Section was cited. Workers were so intimidated they “dared not express their anger in words. They patiently bore it! Why? The reason was that the moment you raised objection, you would immediately be fired.” Furthermore, temporary workers were excluded from membership of the party, the Young Communists, the militia, and were not eligible for election or nomination as deputies, members of Cultural Revolution committees, labour model heroes and so forth.

Early in January a leading Shanghai newspaper reported, under the headline “Thoroughly abolish the system of temporary labour and outside contract labour”, a demonstration in People’s Square by 100,000 people protesting against the temporary labour system and calling for “a brand-new labour system in conformity with Mao Tse-tung thought”. [60] Speakers denounced the fact that temporary workers “could not join the political study classes of their factories or take part in other political activities. Nor could they get the labour protection they deserved.” When they protested, “the power-holders even kept back part of their wages and suspended their work.”

The revolt was brief. Back wages were paid, and possibly other wage demands met. There was a run on the banks and a spending spree. On 9 January Shanghai “rebel organizations” ordered all bank funds to be frozen except authorized expenditure; the “readjustment of wages, payment of back wages and material benefits shall in principle be dealt with at a later stage”. Nonetheless, some of the Red Guards persisted in the face of what was now the disapproval of the party leadership. On 10 January, for example, the Capital Red Guards’ newspaper attacked the temporary and contract worker systems, saying they were attempts to “raise the greatest amount of cheap labour and to extract the maximum profits”.

On 16 January, the People’s Daily outlined the leadership’s case: “The handful suddenly show concern for labour insurance and the well-being of the masses of workers and talk about their promotion, subsidized housing, etc. They vigorously use material incentives to corrupt the fighting spirit of the revolutionary masses. They incite some people to make trouble by demanding economic welfare.” [61] The source of the trouble afflicting the masses was not the conditions of sweated labour, the dedication of the State to the accumulation of capital, it was a strange psychological weakness, “Economism”, incited by “the handful”. The error must be eradicated: “We should educate the comrades of trade unions and the working masses, so that they understand that they should never see the immediate, one-sided welfare benefits exclusively and forget the far-reaching interests of the working masses.”

The line had swung into reverse, but the party had to campaign hard to hold wages stable and to eject workers and students who had returned from the countryside - a return, of course, engineered by nothing more complex than the reactionaries launching the slogan “reverse the injustice of moving to the interior”. They were assured that “the question of finding work for workers who have gone to the countryside ... can be solved gradually”, provided they returned to the countryside. If there were genuine grievances after people had returned, “they can expose and criticize the power-holders by writing letters or by sending big character posters.” [62] Whatever else, they must relinquish their only hold on power - access to the urban mass.

On 17 February, the Central Committee and the State Council declared that the doctrines of the National Rebel General Corps of Red Labourers and other temporary worker organizations were illegal. The party admitted that “the systems governing the employment of temporary workers, contract workers, rotation workers and piece workers are rational in some cases, but are very irrational and erroneous in others.” However, “before the Party Central Committee arrives at a new decision, the established methods are to be followed as usual.” [63] In the meantime, temporary and other workers should have the same political rights as permanent workers; the circular made no mention of the real and vital issue, equal economic rights.

On 27 February, the party - new and old cadres - had mastered the Shanghai situation sufficiently to purge the opposition. Shanghai radio reported that the Liaison Headquarters for Opposing Economism of the Shanghai Municipal Revolutionary Committee “today took over the property and funds of organizations of contract and temporary workers and liaison centres of young intellectuals working in rural areas, of youth working in support of frontiers, and of State farm workers”. [64] All other bodies were forbidden to help or support the proscribed organizations. Obediently, “seventeen revolutionary organizations in Shanghai [offered their] warm support for the Central Committee’s wise and correct notice on temporary workers.”

The festival of the oppressed was over, but the battles were not. Nor were the grievances of temporary workers. Their resentment at the injustice of being promised a revolution, only to have it snatched away at the first sign of serious change, was no doubt one of the threads in subsequent events. For example, in May Canton radio reported a demonstration of “several thousands” demanding an end to rotation work in agriculture. But officially, the establishment had closed ranks. The cause of the temporary workers was thrust into the background. The brief episode has illustrated some of the reality of discrimination against temporary workers and those subject to hsia-fang. One poster on a Shanghai wall gave a poignant twist to the latter: “We are old workers (between fifty and eighty years), illegally sent to the countryside ... If we have to leave Shanghai, where we have lived for twenty or thirty years, and go back to the villages where we have been for only four or five years, this is like gathering the sesame seeds but losing the melon.” [65] Their despair was of less concern to the authorities than saving the price of a pension.

The campaign on behalf of the temporary workers was a microcosm of the Cultural Revolution. A section of the leadership flirted with class issues in order to destroy its rivals within the party, but drew back in alarm when the issues became a real class war. The rebels were only “revolutionaries” in so far as they implemented the aims of this section of the party, which, like its rivals, had no interest in disturbing the basis of its power, the existing production system. That required the “rebels” to oppose any independent initiative by workers, any raising of their real interests (as opposed to the pieties of “political rights”). Some rebels went so far that they had to be reminded not to “regard all workers as conservatives and fight civil wars against them. We must be aware that, except for a few diehards, most of the workers misled by conservative groups are our class brothers”. [66] Some of the rebels were clearly in danger of forgetting who the “leadership” was.

One solid achievement of the Cultural Revolution was the silencing of any public discussion of the “worker-peasant” labour system. Had it been abolished, reduced or radically changed, the government would not have failed to inform the mass of the population through press and radio and thereby win credit for ending such an oppressive feature of employment. The silence indicates that the promises made in January 1967 were not honoured. Indeed, the following September, Wuhan radio once more reported without apology or even a nod at the Shanghai rebels, that 1,600 worker-peasants had been hired in Hupeh cotton-processing centres, and 10,240 in sorting and cotton ginning plants. [67] The temporary and contract worker continues, victim and scapegoat.

Notes

49. Wen Hui Pao, Shanghai, 6 January 1967, SCMP Supplement 64, 28 February 1967, p.3

50. For references, cf. Howe, Wage Patterns, op. cit., pp.107, 127

51. Kung-lu, 20 April 196S, pp. 7-9, cited in Current Scene, VI/5, 15 March 1968

52. Kung-lu 4, cited Hoffman, The Chinese Worker, op. cit., p.72

53. How the worker-peasant labour system is tried out in highway maintenance work, Kung-lu 12, 20 December 1965, SCMM 4, 21 February 1966, p.23; see also The labour system of industrial and farming work in rotation is actively tried out, NCNA Peking, 27 December 1965

54. The worker-peasant labour system in Finance and Trade Departments: Chang Ho-wei, Hsin-chun-she, Nos.1-2, 20 February 1966, in SCMM 534, 25 July 1966

55. JMJP, 28 December 1965, cited Current Scene, op. cit., p.5

56. Current Scene, op. cit.; see also Hung Wei Pao, 30 September 1966 and NCNA Changchun, 11 August 1966

57. Temporary and contract workers, rise up and rebel, Shou-tu-hung-weilun, 13 September 1966

58. Posted 4 January 1967, cited Current Scene, op. cit.

59. Hung-kung Chan-pao, 6 February 1967, SCMP 177, 19April 1967, p.18

60. Wen Hui Pao, 6 January 1967, SCMP Supplement 164, 28 February 1967, p.31

61. JMJP, 16 January 1967; see also joint editorial, JMJP-Hung-ch’i, NCNA, 11 January 1967 on “economism”

62. JMJP, 31 January 1967, and Wen Hui Pao, 12 February 1967

63. Notice on questions of temporary workers, contract workers, rotation workers and external workers, reported Wen Hui Pao, 28 February 1967

64. SWB FE/2404/B/35; see also Wen Hui Pao, 28 February 1967, SCMP 174, 10 April 1967, p.6

65. Cited Current Scene, op. cit., p.17

66. Wen Hui Pao, 3 May 1967

67. 13 September 1967

After the Cultural Revolution, the government set about restoring labour discipline and made renewed efforts to establish what, in sum, might be called a “high productivity-low wage” economy. The watchword again became “race against time to speed up socialist construction”. [68] Those who found work onerous were automatically “bourgeois”, for “to love manual labour is the intrinsic virtue of the proletariat and other working people.” [69]

In the Number 1 Blooming Mill at Anshan (the largest in this, the largest steel complex in China), the cadres urged the workers to “seize every minute, every second, to produce more steel”. [70] To this end, an example was given of a veteran worker who braved the searing heat of the rolls to replace a loose bolt rather than shut down the whole operation to allow it to cool before making the adjustment. Safety of workers was clearly not the first consideration. Nor, in the coal industry, were the hours worked. The mines exceeded their targets “under the inspiration of the Second Plenary Session of the Communist Party’s Tenth Central Committee and the Fourth National People’s Congress ... Most of the coal mines continued production during the Spring Festival ... Many young workers deferred their wedding ceremony or gave up their holidays after marriage so as to cut more coal.” [71]

A Tientsin building company reported that, between 1966 and 1973, labour productivity had been increased by seventy-four per cent, and work completed by fifty-eight per cent. [72] The work was mainly small construction projects. Morale was high. “Trusting the enthusiasm of the masses” had led them to use only the workers’ spare time for work preparation, maintenance of equipment and moving between sites; an example that inspired the medical and nursing staff to follow suit, “so that most of the workers and staff members who were slightly indisposed or had chronic diseases could come to receive medical treatment without encroaching upon the time set aside for labour”. Three examples were offered to illustrate the spirit: firstly, on the Liut’an site, the land was not levelled, half covered by an old concrete road, twenty centimetres in depth and the “earth was frozen and its surface was very hard”. There was no power or water available. Nonetheless, the team refused to wait for power drills, and set to with ordinary iron spades to dig through the soil under the road, breaking it, fragment by fragment, by dropping heavy weights on the surface. Secondly, on another site, the team were required to sink a drainage well, but there was no power to operate the pumps. However, the workers “rushed to carry out their work in the well. In the waist-deep water, they scooped out the mud, spadeful by spadeful”. And thirdly, another gang were building a dormitory. Parts weighing seven to eight hundred catties (roughly seven to eight hundredweight, or 350 to 400 kilograms) arrived at the site, but without hoists to lift them. Nevertheless, “four young workers of the framework group ... insistently carried on their shoulders all these structural parts in the five blocks of the four storey dormitories.” The article received prominent display in the People’s Daily, and the honour of a special recommendation by the editor, stressing its great importance for all cadres.

It was not all plain sailing. There were obstacles to labour discipline. But happily, they were attributable not to bad working conditions but alien class forces. A number of “educated youths” were hostile to the dirty and tiring work. One of them “often associated with some ideologically backward people and often feigned to be suffering from lumbago in the course of work”. However, the “malingering” was short lived. Veteran workers and others called on his home “more than ten times”, and enlisted the help of the man’s parents. In due course, the son gave in.

The ideological climate encourages the most touching complaints. Consider, for example, the case of Chang Chen-an, worker in a Lanchow fertilizer plant, whose contribution to the People’s Daily in 1974 was entitled by the editor, A warm and sincere letter. [73] Chang explained that his plant had fulfilled their production target twenty days ahead of schedule, so the management planned “a general meeting in celebration of victory by sounding drums and gongs and letting off firecrackers. Furthermore, the factory also plans to give everyone a large tea cup and a free meal ticket.” Chang opposed the proposals because they were extravagant and wasteful, leaving the door open to bourgeois influences. The leading cadres in the factory, he concluded, lacked revolutionary spirit. We are not told whether Chang won his promotion. The miserly millowners of eighteenth-century Lancashire would certainly have made him a foreman.

To ensure that the expansion in output was not offset by increased wage bills, the number of workers in any given plant had to be kept constant or even reduced. Chiangnan Locomotive section claimed to “make very economical use of labour resources”; the Wuhan railway sub- bureau boasted that, between 1969 and 1971, the volume of goods carried increased 53.6 per cent, staff by five per cent, and labour productivity by 46.2 per cent. [74] T’angshan Locomotive and Rolling Stock Plant raised the question in terms of “two lines of ideology”. One “line” was “to improve labour productivity and strive for increases in production with no additional workers or just a slight increase in personnel but through tapping the potentialities within the enterprise is a principal way for socialist enterprise to increase production”. The other stated that “to try to increase production with little or no increase in workforce is tantamount to ‘requiring a horse to gallop without feeding it’ - something that can’t be “ The horse, in this case, was the Chinese working class. However, the writers from T’angshan claimed vindication - the work load had been nearly doubled between 1969 and 1970, the targets being fulfilled forty days ahead of schedule, “while cutting the original workforce by ten per cent”. [75] In this way, Mao’s instruction to make the “maximum economical use of manpower and material resources” would be achieved. Indeed, the writers explained, “There is no limit to the economies of manpower.”

A Shansi colliery offered another example. [76] The 1971 workforce of 1,246 had been cut in 1972 by twelve per cent, yet the output of raw coal had increased by thirty-two per cent, labour productivity by forty-three per cent, and profits by a princely 347 per cent. Furthermore, major economies had been made. In one chilling claim, the writers boasted that “the consumption of (pit) props declined by forty-two per cent”; presumably Mao’s thoughts would hold up the roof of the mine shaft. the recent performance was not new. the original construction plan had demanded 200 men working for two years at a cost of RMB 700,000. In practice, however, only seventy-two men had been employed, and had completed the construction “in several months” at a cost of RMB 190,000. either the original planners were incompetent, or the claims exaggerated, or the construction unsafe.

Again, the Shansi pit had its number of malcontents. A cadre examined the poor production performance of teh Number 3 tunnelling team: “When he found that some young miners went down the shaft late and came out early and were lax in discipline, he thought of the problem of labour management.” He found, as one might guess, that “a few young workers were influenced by bourgeois ideology and this was the principal cause of laxity of discipline”. However, education and “mobilizing the masses” did the trick, so that the team labour force could be cut by thirty-one per cent in 1972 (the writers do not say whether those sacked include the young workers of “lax discipline”). The production targets were met four months ahead of schedule.

The report from Shansi, like many other similar accounts, is a paean to what Western managers call “man-management”. Indeed, with a toning-down of some of the more absurd claims, and phrases like “improving communication with the shop floor” or “taking the workers into the confidence of management” substituted for “mobilizing the masses” and “practising Mao Tse-tung thought”, such articles would not be out of place in a Western progress-chaser’s bulletin. Like the capitalists before them, the cadres have discovered that “the masses of people have boundless creative power”, provided they are firmly disciplined. If the cadres only follow Mao, “we can bring the creative power of the masses into full play, and save more manpower to do more things.” In the Shansi colliery, as a result, “most miners have vigorously striven to raise the utilization rate of working hours, with one doing the work of two or even three.” [77] One year later, on the occasion of the 1974 British miners’ strike, Chinese miners were told that “British workers are getting more and more impoverished ... the coal miners, at the bottom of British society, are suffering the most relentless exploitation by monopoly capital.” [78]

If the lay-offs were as extensive as the Chinese press suggested, where did the unemployed go? The régime resumed its efforts to “send down” workers and students from the cities, and cadres from clerical to manual occupations, partly in the last case to provide supervision “on the production front” for the speed-up. Individual workers in “non-productive” jobs - e.g. teachers, public health officials, administrative workers, physical training instructors - were prime candidates for transfer to manual agricultural jobs. Other workers perhaps secured jobs in the “unorganized” sector of city industry - plants employing under one hundred workers, and not covered by the existing social insurance system.

(i) Lenin and “Subbotniks”

The Chinese authorities were not slow to create an appropriate ideological rationale for a general speed-up in production combined with constant or declining earnings and size of workforce. This was the model of “Subbotniks”. Railway workers on the Moscow-Kazan line volunteered in the hard days of May 1919 to work five extra hours without extra pay (on Saturdays, the Sabbath or Subbota) as an increased contribution to the passage of railway freight and so the survival of the beleaguered Soviet State. In a famous speech, A Great Beginning, Lenin greeted this contribution as one of “the young shoots of communism”, a rejection of “bourgeois right” (i.e. the principle that pay should be related to work done) and as an exemplary “display [of the] class consciousness and voluntary initiative of the workers in developing the productivity of labour”. [79] The Subbotniks of China were to be Mao’s “new sprouts of communism” (Mao’s quotation from the Russian loses some of its poetry in the English translation).

Even if we accept Lenin’s formulation - and the retreat into the New Economic Policy suggests he might later have thought his speech premature - does it apply to China? First, Russia was in condition of grave collapse in which extraordinary measures were required to secure survival until the German revolution brought real support. In China, however, the extraordinary is presented as the norm for the long haul of national primitive accumulation. Secondly, in the Soviet Union, the efforts were expected primarily of the Communists rather than the whole labour force. Thirdly, the increase in productivity was in the long term to be based, not on the physical exertion of workers lacking basic equipment - building workers, for example, digging a well with spades, relying on their muscle power and disregarding safety - but on the organization of a technically advanced industry. Lenin criticized those who thought all could equally attain the same level of productivity: “The assumption that all the ‘toilers’ are equally capable of doing this work would be an empty phrase, or the illusion of an antediluvian, pre-Marxian socialist; for this ability does not come of itself, but grows historically and grows only out of the material conditions of large-scale capitalist production.” It is true that “Communism is the higher productivity of labour - compared with capitalist productivity of labour” - but enhanced productivity comes not from more physical labour but the “voluntary, class-conscious united workers, employing advanced technique”. [80] The Chinese emphasis on hard physical labour as itself the mark of socialism is contrasted with the Bolshevik aim of the abolition of hard physical labour.

What happened to the return to labour in conditions of speed-up? There has been no general wage reform of the kind seen in 1956 and therefore the wage structure today corresponds in essentials to the 1956 pattern. In so far as revolutions involve changes in the structure, none has occurred. Real effort was directed up to 1976, however, at ending payments made over and above the eight grade system, an effort which, in the case of bonuses, began in 1950. Cadres have attempted to end overtime pay and similar ancillary awards for extra work (for example, issuing meal tickets for overtime work), while retaining the same work load. Estimates from the mid-1960s put the contribution of bonus and overtime to earnings at between five and seventeen per cent, a not inconsiderable element, given the low level of Chinese wages. Some visitors report that small pay increases were awarded to workers to induce them to give up overtime pay, and there were minor adjustments in prices to reduce the impact of reduced earnings. However, these cannot have been significant, given the scale of labour disputes in 1974 and 1975.

The justification for these changes was an attack on “material incentives”. According to the régime, “material incentives” were “the magic weapons used by Khrushchev and Brezhnev for restoring capitalism”. [81] They still had “a powerful hold on the minds of some people”, not because incomes were low and conditions austere, but “because of bourgeois ideas and the force of old habits ... some of the selfish people are likely ... to go so far as to turn ‘to each according to his work’ into #work according to pay’.” [82] For some writers, it was necessary to detach work from pay altogether: “the money wage received by a labourer represents a part of the total output of society used for individual consumption; this part corresponds to the amount and quality of each worker’s labour, to his social contribution.” How did it “correspond”? Clearly not in terms of a worker’s output since workers were extraordinarily productive. How were income differences to be assessed? Mao divulged no more than that the current wage system was “scarcely different from [that] in the old society”. [83]

By official acknowledgement: “Wages are low and the living standard is not high. We only just get enough clothing and a full stomach. To develop the economy, this situation must be maintained for some time to come.” [84] The efficiency in the distribution of labour between jobs must be poor also, given the efforts made to reduce the size of the bureaucracy whose task it is to direct workers to the right job. As a result, pay must still be used as the primary means of getting people to work, to work harder and to move between jobs so that their skills are used to best advantage.

The contradiction between the two aims - to minimize the loss to accumulation from wages, and to induce people to work and learn skills - is the source of the confusion. As always, this is then attributed to the current enemy: “swindlers of the Liu Shao-ch’i type consistently opposed Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line and politics. In the countryside, they sometimes put ‘wage points in command’ and give ‘material incentives’, and at other times, practice ‘egalitarianism’, violating the socialist principle of distribution and creating confusion.” [85] Liu Shao-ch’i’s contradictory responses are the mirror image of the party leadership’s own contradictory position. In the mid-1950s, “egalitarianism” was a petty bourgeois deviation that “thwarted the enthusiasm of the masses” for work. Now it appears it contributes to the restoration of capitalism, a system apparently identified by great inequality of income!

Understanding the reasons for inconsistency did not help the cadres to meet production targets. In tight spots, working against the clock, they were obliged to contradict one element in policy to achieve another (meeting the target). For example, in a Shansi factory, “in the fourth quarter when time was pressing, the tasks were heavy and pressure was great, some people forgot the previous lesson and decided to pay the workers overtime.” [86] When there are people eager to replace the cadre, it is a dangerous tactic: “After comrades of Number 14 work group of Number 5 workshop wrote an article, Do we work hard to make greater contributions or to earn more money?, they were greatly educated and enlightened ideologically.” The writer does not say whether the education was sound enough to deduct the overtime pay from the workers’ next wage packet. In another factory, workers pressed for overtime pay and were finally given it; whereupon a wall newspaper appeared, denouncing this “bribery”; the party committee, under such an embarrassing threat (with the local party leadership watching), eventually reversed itself once more. [87]

There are many other forms of reward besides straight payment from the wage fund - ranging from preferential treatment in the supply of housing to promotion, titles, invitations to star events, medals, banners, holidays, and travel privileges. Travellers in a north-eastern industrial city in 1976 reported that workers were sometimes awarded goods (cups, basins), sometimes a monthly bonus of five yuan, and sometimes some of China’s fiery liquor, maotai. [88]

The party did not honour its promise of increased pay, made in the heat of the moment in late 1966, although small increases for lower wage grades were announced in 1971 and somewhat larger ones in 1977. More characteristic of the party in these eleven years was the sustained effort to lower labour costs per unit of output. This does not mean that household incomes have not continued to improve since the Cultural Revolution. Due to the rapid expansion in industrial output perhaps, more household members could get jobs and so raise household incomes. As Red Flag reminded workers: “In the past, a worker had to support his whole family. Now his dependants take part in work. So, the aggregate income of a worker’s family is greatly increased.” [89] But the jobs in organized industry cannot have increased very much since 1969; the expansion in output has come from increasing the use of existing industrial capacity rather than adding to it. Perhaps more jobs have been created in unorganized industry, units employing less than one hundred workers. Wages and conditions are much inferior here, and not governed by the eight grade wage system. There are also “a small number of labourers working on their own in the towns” [90], presumably day labourers and petty artisans providing miscellaneous services. The number of those employed outside the organized sector is not clear, nor how stable their income is (some seem to work on a wage point system as in agriculture). Visitors have listed a wide variety of jobs - from subcontracting work for big factories, the manufacture of consumer goods (household utensils, plastic flowers, paper goods) and petty services.

Since the Cultural Revolution, more has been done to encourage cooperative health insurance schemes among unorganized sector workers, and there seems to have been some neglect of the organized sector. Such schemes are financed out of the meagre wages of the workers concerned, and, as a result, provide no cover for old age or disability. The State’s assistance has been limited to the provision of small items of equipment and reductions in the price of basic medicines. [91] It is, however, very remote from any kind of “welfare State”.

(ii) Workers’ control

It could be argued that the “low wage” policy is essentially socialist, not because low wages are the mark of socialism (which would make nineteenth-century capitalism largely socialist!), but because the working class of China voluntarily imposes this policy upon itself as an act of conscious and collective self-discipline. The Cultural Revolution is seen as the time when China’s working class established its power in the State, transforming social relations within society and winning popular control at the base. In sum, there was created workers’ control in the workplaces and workers’ power in the State.

The subject of “workers’ control” is often confused. Some socialists have regarded it as an anarcho-syndicalist aim which would obstruct the realization of the collective interests of the working class, exercised through the State. Others have seen it as no more than the final stage of “participation” by the majority in making important decisions; every increase in participation would then be a step towards the final goal of democracy.

The Bolsheviks came to a different conception. For Lenin, workers’ control was a necessary element in a working-class struggle for power, the tangible expression of class rule at the point of production and the precondition for an effectively planned workers’ State. Participation, by contrast, was the method employers chose to sap the independent class power of workers, to bind them to the purposes of capital. Real power came only through independent workers’ organizations, pursuing their own class interests, whether in the factory or in society.

The Bolsheviks accordingly opposed the proposals of the Provisional Government to create a system of workers’ consultation committees in April 1917. Instead, Lenin argued that “the workers must demand the immediate establishment of genuine control to be exercised by the workers themselves.” [92] The Mensheviks in the Provisional Government argued - as the Chinese Communists did in the 1950s - that the revolution of February 1917 (or 1949 in China) was not a socialist revolution, so the workers should not take over production. They offered participation to ameliorate the wage system without infringing managerial prerogatives. Russian workers themselves provided the answer. In August 1917, a conference of factory committees demanded power to control the composition, the hiring and firing of management, and the internal rules governing factories (hours worked, wages, hiring and firing). The Provisional Government could not concede such demands without jeopardizing its own power, based upon the employers. It denounced “acts of coercion” by the workers as crimes. The Soviets themselves, then under Menshevik influence, urged the workers to restrain themselves; but the excesses’ continued.

For the Bolsheviks, and particularly those workers active on the factory committees, it became clear that the struggle for workers’ control was the necessary complement of the struggle for State power, not some alternative or diversion. Indeed, State power without workers’ control would be no more than a minority seizing the old State machine and trying, without mass initiative, to implement reforms from above. Nationalization of industry by the State was not sufficient: “The important thing will not be even the confiscation of the capitalists’ property, but country-wide, all-embracing workers’ control over the capitalists and their peasant supporters. Confiscation leads nowhere, as it does not contain the element of organization, of accounting for proper distribution.” [93]

In China, the new government did not undertake immediate nationalization, and was careful to protect managerial and private business authority. However, as part of the reorganization of labour, it encouraged measures of consultation through Joint Production Committees and Worker and Staff Representative Committees in the public sector, and Labour-Capital Consultation Committees in the private; public sector committees were not permitted to discuss wage and welfare issues. [94]

However, the priorities of planning soon overtook any functions these committees might perform; everything was subordinated to targets and timing. There were complaints of authoritarianism, but nonetheless, in 1956, the Central Committee affirmed that managers were fully responsible, under the direction of the party committee. In 1957, there was much talk of decentralization (that is, vesting more power in the local party committees). Events in Budapest showed the leadership some of the dangers of permitting the gap between cadres and workers to widen too far. Worker Representative conferences were reorganized, and, for a time, it was claimed they supervised the execution of plant plans (the committees included managers and party cadres). In a much publicized case, the Peking Tram Company set up an administrative committee of nineteen, including workers, managers, technicians, cadres, trade union and Young Communist representatives, empowered apparently to elect managers and supervise the implementation of the plan. Other attempts were made elsewhere, but the government stressed that management was fully responsible for meeting the targets, whatever other committees existed. Little was heard subsequently of these efforts, and, it seems, managers and cadres retained their full authority. The committees became, on one account, “a mere vehicle for management and the party cadre to make speeches.” [95] In the Great Leap Forward, as we have seen, the cadres assumed managerial authority, and rules of operation (of which these committees were part) were only restored in the troubles of 1959.

Managerial authority again came under attack during the Cultural Revolution. There was once more a drive to scrap internal distinctions and what are known as “unreasonable rules and regulations”, or, in Britain, “restrictive practices”. After the first upheaval, revolutionary committees were set up to unite the managers, representatives of the PLA, the party and the Red Rebels. Under the leadership of the PLA, these committees endeavoured to restore discipline, complaining of workers who “in the name of rebellion and opposing slavishness ... in reality stir up anarchism”. [96]

By 1971, factory rules and managerial cadres were once more supreme, but the memory of the hopes of the Cultural Revolution perhaps lingered on. The People’s Daily continued to attack those who “under the influence of the theory that ‘systems are useless’, said that, since the Cultural Revolution had raised the consciousness of the masses, production could be stimulated without systems and rules so that the question of their revival was irrelevant”. [97] Forms of consultation continued in many factories, usually through a consultative body – “worker-management groups” and “Three-in-One” economic management groups (including cadres, managers and workers). Occasional mass meetings were organized by the cadres. Although this does not in itself constitute “consultation”, managers participated in manual labour. Some factories claimed that workers were involved in the election of managers, but it is not clear whether this was just a verbal change in the normal pattern of nomination from above. In a Shanghai watch and clock factory in 1975, “a number of workers have been selected to assume leading positions and take part in management work” [98]; as the report later explains, the selection was made by the factory committee.

This is very far from Lenin’s conception of workers’ control; in one sense, it is its opposite. It is also remote from the party’s own claims that “the rank and file take part in all aspects of management”, a formulation which in any case preserves the idea of management as an authoritative elite. There are in fact no institutions whereby a collective workers’ interest could be expressed, in contradistinction to the interests of management or local party committee. But even if there were, would it constitute workers’ power? The right to control or participate (and the two are very different) in the direction of a factory is only a stable possibility if simultaneously the working class controls the State. For, in China, the national and provincial governments determine the level of wages, the numbers employed, the price of factory output, the allocation of raw materials and skilled labour, and the raw materials and equipment moving between provinces: that is, all the key items that determine what happens inside the factory. An individual worker may well be “self-governing” at home, involving all members of his or her household in deciding what to do; but the alternatives open to the household depend on factors outside the home, and usually outside the household’s control - how many have jobs, what the level of pay is, the conditions and hours of work.

However, this is not the end of the question, for there is another area of “workers’ control”, the struggle for the control of the workplace quite independent of management and cadres, which has been impressively represented in China in recent years: the strike.

(iii) Strikes

The periods of known industrial disputes and strikes have already been mentioned - 1955-7, 1966-8 and 1974-6. From the Chinese press and radio, it is possible to reconstruct some of the disputes.

Forms of worker resistance range from resisting pay cuts or deterioration in conditions, refusing work discipline, disobeying the law or factory regulations (including changing jobs or place of residence without permission) through to direct resistance, the go-slow, outright strikes, refusals to work, to accept direction or transfer, and even attacks on the factory or managers. The sanctions similarly range from the mild - reprimands, public criticism by the cadres through wall posters or mass meetings, backed up by fines deducted from pay, loss of seniority or demotion, to the more severe: being transferred to a rural area and “re-education”. In some cases, workers were sent to prison; for example, in July 1957, the three leaders of a demonstration outside the manager’s office at the Chungking Machine Tool factory were arrested as “counter-revolutionaries”. In the l950s, labour correctional camps were created to “re-educate” rebel workers. In extreme cases, even the death penalty was used; at the Kweilin Building Company, cadres were beaten up during a strike, and the two strike leaders were tried and sentenced to death, others being given terms of imprisonment. [99]

Was the situation qualitatively transformed by the Cultural Revolution? Certainly, the new constitution for the first time acknowledged that strikes took place and legalized them, but in practice how were things changed? The campaign in 1973 and 1974 to end all payments above the eight grade wage system produced a rash of opposition (perhaps difficulties were exacerbated by shortages of foodstuffs). Reports of disorder, go-slows and absenteeism occurred through 1974 and 1975, particularly in the mines, the steel industry and railways, and in a number of cities (Shanghai, Anshan, Hsuchow, Nanch’ang, Canton and Wuhan; in Kwantung, Liaoning, Kiangsi, Heilungkiang and Shensi). [100] Indeed, some foreign observers attributed the 1975 drop in steel output to labour resistance to the abolition of overtime pay. In Heilungkiang, the radio reported that “factionalism has greatly disrupted and undermined our revolution and production”; the militia was required to protect cadres in some areas from those who “misled” the people. Troops were sent to Hsuchow (Kiangsi) and also to the Tahuangshan coal mines.

However, Hangchow (Chekiang province) was the place that received most publicity in 1975, perhaps because it was the location of Mao’s summer retreat. The factories there were apparently disturbed from early 1974. Late in the year, an expanded provincial militia was introduced into the city to police a sort of martial law on the streets. However, the militia itself is said to have divided into warring groups, and the troubles were sufficiently severe for train drivers to refuse to pass through the city (the line through Hangchow connects Shanghai to the south). As a result, there were severe delays of freight which were not overcome until May 1975.

In the spring, the new Vice-chairman of the party, Wang Hung-wen, who is credited with taming the Shanghai workers in the Cultural Revolution, was despatched to the city but without success. Chekiang troops were then moved in and public security squads from north China were drafted in to patrol the streets. The leading deputy Prime Minister, Teng Hsiao-p’ing, also visited the city, and perhaps was instrumental in framing the Central Committee and Standing Council resolution on the situation: “a handful of counter-revolutionary revisionist elements and newly emergent bourgeois elements sneaking into the party and the army and headed by sworn adherents of Lin Piao and Liu Shao-ch’i in Chekiang, vainly attempted to subvert the dictatorship of the proletariat in collaboration with the landlords, the rich, the counter-revolutionaries, the bad and the rightists ... [and] stirred up anarchism, factionalism and an evil wind of economism; conducted armed struggles; made trouble; interrupted the supplies of electricity and running water; disrupted production and transport; made a sally against troops; and blasted public security departments.” [101] The resolution concluded that “chief plotters shall be severely punished according to the law. As to the masses, we should re-educate them and let bygones be bygones.”

The resolution was perhaps the signal for the final effort - over 10,000 PLA troups moved into the city to take over the thirteen leading factories. The municipal authority was reorganized, three leading officials replaced, and the local party put in order. Officially, the troops were necessary because the workers of Hangchow were “unable to increase production under the pernicious influence of the counter-revolutionary revisionist line and bourgeois factionalism and due to the sabotage activities of a handful of class enemies”. [102]

Officially, the PLA - and later, air force and naval units - undertook “participation in manual labour”, or peacemaking. From 12 July, when PLA unit 1815 took over a car component manufacturing plant, there was a stream of reports of particular units taking particular factories - textile mills on 19 July, a textile printing and dyeing plant on 21 July, and a wool textile mill. The 7th PLA company worked at the cement warehouses where “they completed one day’s work in two hours and were praised by the workers”. [103] Air force units were sent into factories manufacturing heavy machinery, oxygen equipment, steam turbines, boilers and glass works. “They all took the initiative in carrying forward the same vigour ... and worked continuously, fearing neither heat nor fatigue.” Commander Li Chi-ming “set a good example to the fighters by arduously working for a few hours ... deputy commander Ni Chungsheng ... actively took the lead in unloading coal. He never uttered a word despite the blisters on his hands ... In one day, ten cadres and fighters unloaded fifty tons of cement, and none of them complained of being tired.” The workers must have been impressed at this temporary display of a fortitude they were expected to show month in month out.

Successive mass meetings were held to pull the local cadres into line - for example, 8,000 provincial cadres assembled on 22 July, and 15,000 on the 24th. Similar meetings were held in the main factories, to “vigorously denounce Liu Shao-ch’i and Lin Piao”. As a result, reports said, everyone agreed to work harder - even “cooks in the cafeteria strove to increase the variety of dishes. They provide the workers with steamed bread and hot vegetable soup.” Bus drivers, after finishing their regular runs in the daytime, “returned in the evening to drive the night shift”; there were presumably no safety regulations to limit the number of hours of driving. The cadres “have made use of their holidays and days off to do manual labour and have taken the lead in tackling the most difficult jobs”.

(iv) Theory and practice

In study classes at three factories in Chengchow, Honan, the cadre leadership raised the then fashionable, but curious, question, twenty-six years after the seizure of power in 1949, and eight or nine years after what was called a “proletarian seizure of power” in the Cultural Revolution: “Should the leaders of an enterprise put the workers in the position of the masters, trust and rely on them and ceaselessly strengthen their position in enterprise management, or regard them simply as hired labour and squeeze them out of management and supervision of the enterprise?” The implication escaped the cadres - he who has the power to choose the master is himself the master.

That curious quality is repeated in numerous statements of the party. The workers must be told that the factories belong to them, since there is no way that they will discover this in their daily experience. It was, according to the party’s accusations, Liu Shao-ch’i, like those early anti- capitalist dreamers of the socialist movement, who urged that labour should be paid more, or should be paid even the whole value of their labour. The writer’s indignation at such an idea leads him to employ the same metaphor as would be used in the West - if workers consume all they produce, they will “kill the goose that lays the golden egg”; there will be nothing with which to “build socialism”. [104]

For nearly twenty years, the régime continued to pay annual profits of five per cent on capital to China’s former capitalists. It was at the same time striving to hold down wages, increase output, cut the permanent labour force and dilute it with temporary and contract workers. None of the central leadership questioned this procedure. Labour was treated as an important factor of production, the goose that laid the golden eggs, and it was production which was the régime’s continuing obsession. Labour was treated throughout, despite the rhetoric expended on “the working class”, as essentially passive, a commpdity. If workers objected, they were accused of being the creatures of just those capitalists, so richly rewarded and protected by the régime. Workers reacted on the scale they did not because they were being manipulated nor because bad thoughts somehow persisted in their heads, but because of the onerous disciplines imposed upon them by the régime’s pursuit of production.

Is the position of workers in the People’s Republic qualitatively different from that in other societies? In objective terms it is the same, even if the propaganda is different. By no serious standard can the Communist party in the period since 1949 - or since 1968 - be seen as the leadership or representative of the Chinese working class. Chinese workers have been the object, not the subject, of modern Chinese history.

Notes

68. NCNA Peking, 28 December 1974, SCMP S770, 10 January 1974

69. To idle and not to idle, Hsiao Tung, PLA, JMJP, 13 January 1969, SCMP 4350, January 1969

70. North-east heavy industrial workers go all out to produce more, NCNA Shenyang, 1 May 1973

71. NCNA Peking, 7 April 1975, SCMP 5834, l7 April 1975

72. Grasp well education in the line, arousing revolutionary spirit, from No.2 work section, Tientsin Municipal No.2 Building Construction Company, JMJP, 18 September 1973, SCMP 5469, 1-5 October 1973, pp.1S9-60

73. JMJP, 25 January 1974, SCMP 553, 14 February 1974

74. JMJP, 28 October 1972, SCMP 5244, 13-17 November 1972, p.8

75. Economize on manpower wherever possible, Hung-ch’i II, 1 November 1972, SCMM 741-2, 27, 4 December 1972, p.30

76. Chiangchiawan Colliery, Tat’ung Municipality, Shansi, in Hung-ch’i 3, 3 March 1973, SCMM 749-50, 26 March-2 April 1973, p.55

77. Chiangchiawan Colliery, op. cit.

78. NCNA Peking, 15 February 1974

79. SW9 (1937), pp.423-45

80. Ibid., p.439; stress added

81. Kuang-ming JP, 27 April 1975

82. JMJP, 15 May 1975, SCMP 75-24, 9-13 June 1975

83. PR, 28 February 1975, p.5

84. Teng Hsiao-p’ing, 2 October 1974, interviewed by Professor Fan Lan, cited Carl Riskin, Workers’ incentives in Chinese industry, in China: A Reassessment of the Economy, Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress, Washington, 1975, p.201

85. Perseveringly put politics in command, do a good job of reckoning wages of labour, Lin An, JMJP, 12 August 1972, SCMP 5199-5203, 21-25 August 1972, p.186. The criticism continues: “They vigorously practise ‘egalitarianism’ for the purpose of sabotaging the policy of more pay for more work and equal pay for equal work, thwarting the enthusiasm of the masses in production, undermining the development of the productive forces, disintegrating the collective economy and restoring capitalism.”

86. Sian radio, Shensi, 11 March 1975, SWB FE/4860/BII, p.20

87. Report, China News Summary, 555, 19 February 1975

88. Reported, Far Eastern Economic Review 94/40, 1 October 1976, pp.89-90

89. The essential distinction between two systems of distribution, Hung-ch’i 7, 1 July 1972, SCMM 733-4, 3 July-8 August 1972, p.56

90. Kuang-ming JP, 19 May 1975, SCMP 75-23, 26 June 1975

91. For details, see Some basic facts about China: ten questions and answers, in China Reconstructs, Supplement, January 1974, p.91; for further details after a visit, cf. Joyce Kallgren, Welfare and Chinese industrial workers: Post-Cultural Revolution Prospects and Problems, unpublished paper, August 1976

92. 17 May 1917, CW24, p.428; Lenin’s stress

93. CW26, pp.107-8

94. Strictly implement Joint Production Committees, Ch’ang Chiang JP, 29 May 1951

95. L’i Ch’un, Why is it necessary to broaden the management of our enterprises?, Chung-Kuo kung-jen, 6, 27 March 1957, cited by Choh-ming Li, Chinese Industry, CQ 17, Jan-March 1964, pp.26-7

96. JMJP, 15 July 1969

97. Grasp ideology systems and technique, JMJP, 8 October 1971

98. SWB 4964/BII/9, 25 July 1975; stress added

99. Hoffman, The Chinese Worker, op. cit., Table 5:1, pp.146-7

100. Reports, China News Summary, Nos. 577-8, August 1975; on Shensi, SWB 4971 /BII/8

101. Central Committee and State Council, Resolutions concerning the problem of Chekiang province, 24 July 1975, translated and published, Issues and Studies, June 1976, pp.102-5

102. Hangchow radio, 21-22 July, SWB 4965i and 4, 26 July 1975

103. NCNA, 2 August l975, in SWB 4976/BII/5-6, 8 August 1975

104. The essential distinction, op. cit. (note 89), p.59

Before we examine the provisions and implementation of the Agrarian Reform Law of 30 June 1950, it may be useful to outline what the “peasant revolution” meant in the Russia of 1917.

The inequality in landholding under Tsarism was much more extreme than in China. In the late nineteenth century, some 28,000 landowners had holdings 202 times that of the average peasant [105], whereas in China, landlord holdings were between five and fourteen times the average. The holding of land was the economic basis of the Tsarist aristocracy, the social foundation of Tsarism itself; in China, the social foundation of power was an oligarchic combination of relatively small landlords, merchants and capitalists (land had been freely bought and sold in China for some two thousand years). It followed that, in Russia, the peasant seizure of the land was a decisive factor in destroying the old order, but in China it could not play the same role; destruction of the old order needed to encompass land, trade and industry. It also followed that a land revolution in China could not provide even the temporary material basis for an alternative form of production, self-sufficient small-holdings; the need for industrialization, for the provision of work outside agriculture, was much greater than in Soviet Russia.

Under the impact of the February revolution, sporadic peasant assaults on the holdings of the landowners took place through the spring of 1917. Some of the owners tried to sell out in panic. As a result, the first demand of the local peasant committees was for a ban on land sales. The Provisional Government urged the peasants to be patient and await the termination of the World War for a proper land settlement: “The land question cannot be resolved by any means of seizures. Violence and robbery are the worst and most dangerous expedients in the realm of economic relations ... The land question must be resolved by means of law, passed by the representatives of the people. Proper consideration and passage of a land law is impossible without serious preparatory work: thecollection of materials, the registration of land reserves, [the determination of] the distribution of land property, and the conditions and forms of land utilization.” [106] The Provisional Government was determined to keep control in its own hands: “A great disaster threatens our native land should the local population take upon itself the reorganization of the land system without waiting for the decision of the constituent assembly. Such general arbitrary actions carry the threat of general ruin.” [107] The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries (the main radical peasant party) in the government stressed the same point – the need to defend existing production and retain control in the hands of the government. “Do not confuse the socialization of land”, a Social Revolutionary Congress adjured the peasants, “with its arbitrary seizure for personal gain!”, a notion to become in China “economism”.

The advice could scarcely be heard in the din. The peasants, mobilized and stimulated by their mutinous soldier sons, began in some areas to seize the land, to burn down the manor houses of their hated overlords, to seize the stocks of grain, equipment and animals in the lord’s outbuildings. In other areas, they unilaterally cut rents and seized uncultivated land. Within the Social Revolutionary party, a schism opened between the “responsible” national leadership and the village committees.

The Bolsheviks did not lead, organize or actively promote the peasant revolution, although they recognized the decisive importance of this “peasant war” for the workers’ struggle. As early as 1905, Lenin had expressed the precondition for this war: “There is only one way to make the agrarian reform, which is unavoidable in present-day Russia, play a revolutionary role: it must be effected on the revolutionary initiative of the peasants themselves, despite the landlords and the bureaucracy, and despite the State, i.e. it must be effected by revolutionary means.” [108] The position was repeated after the February fall of Tsarism in April 1917. As to the Provisional Government’s advice to the peasants to wait, advice backed by troops driving the squatters off the land, the Bolsheviks were intransigent: “As to the land”, Lenin mimicked the government, “wait until the constituent assembly. As to the constituent assembly, wait until the end of the war. As to the end of the war, wait until complete victory. That is what it comes to. The capitalists and landowners, having a majority in the government, are plainly mocking the peasantry.” [109] The Tsar might have been overthrown, but the social foundation of Tsarism, large landed estates, had survived intact. Only the immediate seizure of land, whatever the dangers in the ongoing war, would settle the question.

The party adopted en bloc the programme of the national Congress of Peasant Soviets (19 August 1917) as its own – for the abolition of the private ownership of all land without compensation, confiscation of livestock and equipment, a ban on all waged labour, an equal and periodically readjusted distribution of land among all peasant households. It was not a programme formulated by the party – indeed, Lenin argued it would not work; but it was the programme of the peasantry, and must be wholeheartedly embraced by the party if the workers’ revolution was to succeed.

(i) Agrarian reform in China

Up to 1949 the position of the Chinese Communist party corresponded roughly to that of the Provisional Government in Russia – the maintenance of rural production to support the war first with Japan and then with the Kuomintang was the dominant preoccupation of the party. The programme was designed to achieve this while “maintaining the enthusiasm” of the peasants and the collaboration of all landed classes, including the landlords and the “patriotic gentry”. To this end, the cadres were required to prevent any spontaneous initiative by the mass of cultivators to settle the land question, to undercut the social foundations of Kuomintang power on the countryside. The party did not depend on the peasants except as cultivators and army recruits.

With State power, the party moved quickly to change land relations, both to go some way towards honouring its promises, and to eliminating Kuomintang, warlord and bandit power in the countryside. The Agrarian Reform Bill laid down that the land, equipment, animals and surplus houses of landlords, of temples, of industrialists and merchants, be either confiscated or requisitioned for redistribution. The land and properties of rich and middle peasants (including well-to-do middle peasants) were to be protected, although land rented by rich peasants might in certain circumstances be requisitioned. [110]

It was, on the face of it, a clean sweep of landlord power. But the “cleanness” depended upon the application of the classification used in the bill – landlord, rich and middle peasants. It was not at all clear to whom these labels properly attached unless the mass of the peasants were given the right to say which peasant households in their village belonged to which class (but then they would not need the bill except to ratify their decisions after the event). The peasants were firmly refused the right. It was the party cadre who had to make the key decisions. An elaborate code was laid down to guide him, but no code could encompass the complexity of China’s rural social structure, could eliminate the arbitrary and discretionary factor. [111] Even so the code included strange anomalies. The same family, for example, could include members of different classes: “The status of those members who take part in labour, if their position in the family is not a dominant one but a subordinate one, should be appropriately determined as labouring people in order to distinguish them in status from other family members who do not participate in labour.” [112]

For those unfortunate enough to be classed as “landlord”, there were escape routes. In due course, they could secure reclassification. Their urban and non-agricultural properties were protected. In the 1930s, landlord merchant activities had been important – between a fifth and a third of landlords in some provinces were said to be engaged in trade as their main occupation. [113]

The one certain thing was that the peasants should not be permitted to settle these questions themselves. Reform must not be undertaken at all if there were insufficient numbers of trained cadres available to control it. “It is necessary that the party cadres for land reform are, both in quantity and quality, capable of grasping local reform work without letting the masses indulge in spontaneous activities” [114]; or again: “Spontaneous struggles by the peasants must be firmly prevented in agrarian reform ... Pending the arrival of an agrarian reform work team, no official action is permitted and only policy, publicity and preparatory work are permitted.” [115] To cope with the demand, the party had to be vastly expanded, and, wherever possible, backed by military or public security forces lest the bitterness of decades explode and engulf the party in a “peasant war”. William Hinton in his vivid account of Fanshen, explains why the poor peasants were not permitted to “make a revolution”: “The military potential, the productive capacity and the political genius of the peasants had to be cultivated, mobilized and organized, not simply ‘liberated’ ... Without the Communist party, the poor peasants could easily have carried the Revolution so far to the Left as to convert it into its opposite, a restoration from the Right. Without the Communist party, the poor peasants might well have divided everything right down to the last bowls and chopsticks on the farmsteads ... and in so doing would have destroyed the only productive base on which they had to build . . . such mistakes would only have broken the peasant population into factions, based on kinship, religious affiliation, personal influence and gang loyalty.” [116]

Implementing the law

The implementation of the 1950 law depended on the strength of the local party and the reaction of the landlords. Landlords and rich peasants produced the marketable surplus of foodstuffs that kept the cities, and the party, alive. Yet the surplus was produced on relatively small holdings – to seize all the landlords’ and rich peasants’ land would eliminate the surplus without giving the mass of cultivators land adequate to support all. To take over all the land would be to break the fundamental link between the cultivator and his patch of soil, to destroy the incentive to cultivate altogether, resulting in national calamity – even if the party could have mobilized sufficient manpower to carry out such a policy. Party tactics were concerned with preserving the surplus rather than meeting the interests of the poor and landless. For this reason, different measures had to be employed in different localities, spread over a period of time, as the party advanced, then retreated when the surplus was threatened, then advanced again, edging slowly towards the elimination of the landlords. In Kiangsu, for example, the East China Military Administration varied its tactics in different districts – from rent and interest reduction to confiscation – the tactics being determined by the need to sustain peasant incentives, especially in the sowing and harvesting seasons. [117] The Administration was also concerned not to disturb trade and industry, so the draught animals, tools and buildings used by landlords for handicraft or trading activities were excluded from confiscation. Nonetheless, there was landlord opposition, expressed in the slaughter of livestock, destruction of equipment, concealment of arms and assaults on the peasants; in some cases, work brigades were bribed to ignore such activities, and rents secretly continued to be collected. At such stages, the Administration was obliged either to intervene to put down landlord opposition, or to retreat. In south Kiangsu, the regulations were diluted to mollify the landlords – the land brought into cultivation since 1948 was excluded; landlords were compensated for work already done in preparing the land; the land allowance for “non-agricultural” activities of landlords, was made more generous, even though this reduced the stock available for redistribution. As one official document recorded: “This is against the interests of the peasants. However, in order to avoid confusion it is better to allow the landlords to keep their properties and enable them to invest in production.” [118]

The difficulties were severe, not merely because of the obligation to maintain tight party control. The amount of land available for redistribution was limited. Nationally, it was claimed that 700 million mou of land were redistributed to 300 million peasants, an average of two and one third mou per head, or a little over a third of an acre. [119] The variation between provinces was great – from ten mou in mountainous Shensi, to between one and three mou in south Shensi, Hunan, Hupeh and Honan, and between 0.7 and three mou in east China (Shantung, Kiangsu, Chekiang, Anwhei). [120] The average per head in south Kiangsu was about 1.15 mou, or about a sixth of an acre. Since the middle peasants also received land – on average, 1.1 mou, in comparison to the 1.2 mou received by the poor and landless – the effect was to strengthen the middle peasants without making available to the poor enough land to secure an adequate livelihood. The middle peasants (and, depending on the favour of the local cadres, some of the “rich” classified as “middle”) retained substantially more and better land, better supplies of water, fertilizer, draft animals and tools, giving them, on average, yields thirty per cent above the poor peasants. The average rich peasant holding in south Kiangsu remained on average twice the size of the average in the given locality, and its yield of grain, ninety-five per cent above that of middle peasant holdings. [121]

It was the party’s estimate of what was objectively possible, not the interests of the poor and landless, which remained the guiding imperative. The chairman of the East China Military administration, paraphrasing those countless statements in the party’s earlier history, expressed it thus: ”We must constantly keep in mind the interests of farm labourers, look after their livelihood and ... raise their political consciousness and cultural standard. On the other hand, we must patiently educate the farm labourers to prevent ‘leftist’ sentiment and deviation. No demand must go beyond the scope permitted by the present economic situation. If they exceed the scope, nobody will employ farm labourers.” [122] As so often, the exploited must support the exploiters if the continued basis of their exploitation is to be preserved!

The surprisingly conservative nature of the land reform perhaps partly explains the relative mildness of the opposition. in relationship to the size of the rural population, the numbers of “bandits” were well within the scope of the party’s armed power. But still, in some areas, collisions were bitter – in 1951, the Minister of Public Security complained, for example, of continued “banditry” in south-west Kiangsi, claiming that 7,210 cadres and others had been murdered, 26,600 houses burned down and 200,000 cattle stolen. When cadres attempted to collect grain procurements, they were sometimes violent [123], and this evoked strong resistance; according to Finanace Minister Po I-po; “more than 3,000 cadres sacrificed their lives in the cause of collecting public grain.” [124] Mao later claimed that 2.3 million people had been “killed, locked up and controlled” up to 1956. [125]

The victory of the Communist party in China had brought order and security to the squalor, violence and corruption of rural China under the Kuomintang. Supplies were at long last becoming available, and as the distribution network developed, the danger of local famine was brought increasingly under control. The depredations of the landlords had been ended, and elementary reforms in the village begun. Yet conditions remained harsh. With only marginally more land, rent and interest payments were now replaced by public procurements in the hands of arbitrary cadres, themselves harried by a remote national authority. A complex of taxes – on salt and foodstuffs, on slaughtering animals – increased the burdens. As a result of the civil war, in the early years there was a dearth of industrial goods and considerable price inflation. The local granaries and sources of credit, formerly under the tight but tangible control of the landlord, were now directed by an impersonal and distant State. Public grain distribution was less flexible than under the old order. In the case of credit, the State’s inability to meet and police local demands obliged it to permit a resumption of private lending at whatever rates of interest the market would bear. [126] The strong mixture of revolution had become very dilute by the time it reached the villages.

(ii) Co-operativization

Land reform was, as the Act stated, a method of “setting free the rural productive forces, developing agricultural production and so [paving] the way for New China’s industrialization”. Yet to accomplish this, the scarcity of land, equipment and animals had to be overcome or neutralized. For this, a massive programme of investment in the land would have been required. But the new government was devoted to expanding industry first, and there was little investment left for agriculture. Instead, the peasants were urged to pool their resources in cooperatives. At first, this meant no more than traditional forms of cooperation – Mutual Aid Teams (covering three to five households for teams created for particular seasons, and between six or seven up to twenty for year-round co-operation). From there, the party raised its sights to the “lower level” co-operatives, covering about 100 households, where the principle of pay was based, not on the amount of land contributed, but on the labour provided in the year. Co-operatives went some way to centralize activities and render more effective State supervision and access to the agricultural goods (provided the State assumed monopoly control of agricultural trading which it did from 1953). By the end of 1952, the government claimed that forty per cent of the farm population worked in Mutual Aid Teams, and the cadres moved on (although at different speeds in different localities) to promoting “producer co-operatives”.

In the main, these changes still did not go beyond the traditional forms of co-operation. The producer co-operatives came closest to changing the basic structure, and evoked much opposition (which the party attributed to the rich peasants being unwilling to pool their resources). In 1953, the government retreated in order that procurements should not suffer; about a third of the co-operatives by then established were dissolved. In the autumn, a further attempt was made. However, opposition again led to a slackening of the pace in the spring of 1955. It was then that Mao accelerated the whole process. The target was to be 100 per cent “high-level” co-operativization by 1960. The cadres were to brook no resistance; all opposition was now denounced as “Rightist”; furthermore, “semi-socialist” co-operatives were superseded by the aim of full collectivization. By March 1956, the government claimed eighty-five per cent of rural households worked in “semi-socialist” co-operatives, and by the end of the year ninety-six per cent. Agriculture no longer waited on industrialization to achieve “socialization”; its organization was being transformed in advance.

There were other forces at work on the countryside. The ink was barely dry on the new land deeds before the fluctuation in the agricultural economy and the high demand for foodstuffs from the cities as a result of the drive to industrialization began to drive the poor marginal cultivators out of production, and concentrate an increasing share of land, equipment and animals in the hands of the new, euphemistically styled “middle peasants”. Each rural downturn as well as the need to make special expenditures forced the marginal cultivator to borrow, to mortgage his land, animals and equipment, and usually to do so when interest rates were high and agricultural selling prices low. A report from five villages in a former “old Liberated Area” in Shansi concluded that: “Since land reform, ninety-six peasant families in the five villages have sold a total of 284.11 mou of land to pay for wedding and funeral expenses, and the like. Ninety-nine peasant families bought land. Private ownership of land, natural calamities, and other inevitable misfortunes have caused a small portion of the peasantry to lose labour and land and become once more impoverished. On the other hand, another small portion of the peasantry has risen in status. This is the reason for emergent rural class distinctions.” [127] In north China, the chairman of the Administrative Committee complained that “a considerable number of peasants sold their land and became impoverished shortly after land reform.” [128]

The cadres were no protection against the resurgence of rural capitalism. Many were already rich peasants on joining the party, or used their power and influence to become so. The party centre might forbid the rural cadres to hire labour, rent out land or lend money, but to no avail. In 1952, one of the party leaders warned: “If no active steps are taken ... to lead the peasant towards the path of co-operative economy rather than to the rich peasant economy, then rural village government is sure to deteriorate into a rich peasant régime. If the Communist party members all hire labour and give loans at usurious rates, then the party will become a rich peasant party.” [129] Three years later, Mao himself complained that “new rich peasants spring up everywhere”, while “many poor peasants still live in poverty for lack of sufficient means of production, with some in debt and others selling or renting land”. [130] It was not surprising that there was a flight of peasants to the cities.

The “new rich” peasants produced the marketable surplus, and strongly resisted the increase in controls as the State strove to secure a stable grain supply for industrialization. Their response was to lower production or divert an increasing share of it from the fixed price State procurements to the free or black market. The floods of 1954-5 illustrated the problem. Output declined as procurements, in the interest of the industrial plan, increased. One leading party member estimated procurements at fifty-two million tons (or thirty per cent of the harvest), a considerable increase on the twenty-five to thirty million tons taken in rent by the landlords. [131] The peasants hoarded their grain, as Mao acknowledged. They followed the “dead cattle” policy of slaughtering their livestock, both to save grain used as fodder and to prevent the co-operatives acquiring them. Between July 1954 and July 1955, the national stock of pigs fell from 102 million to eighty-eight million, and by July 1958 (when purchase prices were raised) to eighty-four million. [132] Mao blamed the landlords and rich peasants, not co-operativization and State procurements. In Kiangsi, he said, the people who complained were cadres, a third of whom were really “well-to-do peasants, or formerly poor and lower middle peasants who had become well-to-do peasants”. [133]

The disturbances led to no slackening in the pace of accumulation, but Mao henceforth stressed the need to watch peasant welfare. The peasants must be looked after, then “the mouth of the bourgeoisie will have been stopped up”. “Like us, the peasants have to eat and be clothed. They are paying for many things with coupons alone. This will not do. They will still conceal their grain and not sell it.” [134] In the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, he put it more cynically: “tackling production without tackling living would definitely result in tens of thousands of dropsy cases.” [135] In the short term, procurement prices were raised, more effort devoted to increasing rural employment, and the “three fixed” policies proclaimed (fixed production, purchase and sale of grain), setting the total volume of procured grain at 43.25 million tons.

None of this, however, did much to alleviate the burden on the peasants. Nineteen fifty-six saw another tide of complaints against food shortages, the privileged position of the cities, the petty tyranny of the cadres and the depredations involved in co-operativization. The government rejected the charges, claiming that in 1956 the average consumption per person was of the value of RMB 180 for workers and RMB 81 for peasants, a doubling of the prewar average. Yet the eloquent language of the stomach confounded the statistics. The government was obliged, because of the shortages, to cut the grain and cloth ration. It also relaxed some of the constraints on private rural markets and the drive to form co-operatives; some 100,00 peasant households are said to have left Kwantung’s co-operatives as a result. The prices paid for animals and equipment taken over by the co-operatives were also increased. Furthermore, the size of the co-operatives was reduced, making the village production team or brigade the effective level. The One Hundred Flowers movement – and a rectification campaign against “commandism” by the cadres – were tokens of the government’s goodwill.

(iii) After the Great Leap Forward

The pessimism of the early 1960s prompted a reassessment of the situation. The rural masses now became, not an advantage because they were “poor and blank” and could be directed to any end the leadership chose, but “a big problem”: “The population of the rural areas is a big problem, if we are to do away with an excess of population. To solve this, we must develop production rapidly ... Year in and year out, they labour without getting enough to eat.” [136] Peasant attitudes could be changed only slowly and after industrialization: “When the system of ownership by the basic commune has been put into effect, private property has been nationalized; new cities and big industries dot the whole country, communes and transport have been modernized, and economic conditions have been completely changed, the world outlook of the peasants will change little by little until the process is complete.” [137]

The “rich peasant economy” reappeared. But there was no Great Leap to reverse the restoration. The party henceforth was more cautious and conservative, lest it inflict upon itself a repetition of the “three hard years”. By comparison with the Great Leap Forward, the Socialist Education Movement was small in its impact on the rural population. Nor did the Cultural Revolution have any dramatic effect. The veto on worker and peasant participation could not be upheld in the cities in the heady days of 1966 and 1967, but in the countryside, the mass of the peasantry could be excluded. A number of cultivators took the opportunity to go to the cities with their children; and some of the Big Character posters listed their grievances – high interest rates on loans, poor selling prices, compulsory procurements, low wages (ten to twenty yuan per month) and poor supplies of meat. Some villages held meetings, and the local capitalist roaders received a drubbing. But in general, the mass of the rural population remained onlookers, the recipients of reforms (such as improved rural medical services) rather than the initiators.

(iv) After the Cultural Revolution

The short swing to the “Right” from 1969 produced an affirmation that private agriculture, the right to raise livestock and practise “sideline” activities (handicrafts, trade, peddling) were inviolable rights of the rural population. Indeed, the first two were explicitly dissociated from any “capitalist road”, and praised for damping down inflation and the black market. [138] However, in the subsequent swing “Left” there were complaints that private agriculture and other activities were becoming excessive, that the extension of private rural markets was going too far, that too much rural labour was involved in private trade and commodity speculation, and that party cadres were involved in all these activities and were guilty of secret contracting of labour. [139]

However, when some cadres drew the logical conclusion and proposed to abolish private plots and markets, they were reminded that such activities were a “supplementary part of the socialist economy”, and that abolition “would dampen the masses’ enthusiasm for socialism and undermine the development of the forces of production”. [140] It was the same as the problem of wage differentials. Maintaining the “masses’ enthusiasm for socialism” required practices which the party said led directly to the contradiction of socialism!

How important were these activities? Rural “sidelines” were supposedly marginal to the village economy, yet some reports suggest this was not always the case. In one instance, the rural cadres express unease at the profitability of their enterprise: “the production and marketing of our transformer switches are not included in the State plan. We have travelled far to look for and sign marketing contracts; we have produced the raw materials for transformer switches ourselves. We have also processed some products for others. This, of course, has an impact on the State plan. We should consider whether such a way of sideline production is socialist or capitalist.” [141]

Most of the practices condemned benefited only the richer teams, brigades and households. For the poor, and especially those in persistent deficit (that is, their consumption was regularly above their income), matters were not improved in either the “Right” or “Left” phase. In late 1975, letters of appeal for loans from poor villages in Kwantung reached relatives in Hong Kong, alleging that they were subject to a drive by the rural cadres to foreclose on debts. One letter complained that: “Those who are unable to do so [meet their debts] must sell their bicycles, watches, sewing machines, valuable household items and even their piglets to pay off their debts. Under the leadership of the cadres, this movement is a vigorous one and nobody dares to oppose it.” [142]

For the régime, the peasants were the scapegoats of China. In the years after the Cultural Revolution the press regularly cited Mao in support of the proposition that the peasants were to blame for the country’s difficulties. In particular, they repeated a 1963 quotation: “as small owners, they are individualistic and, what is more important, limited by their working conditions and methods and their use of outdated means of production; they are scattered, narrow-minded and ill-informed.” [143]

Such abuse affected rural life very little. The condition of the average household was hard, despite the improvements over the years. Although, from time to time, the modest “sideline” activities of the majority, so important for rural incomes, might come under attack because they competed with the State’s demand for land, labour and fertilizers, it does not seem to have affected the rural areas greatly. [144] The main problems remained – keeping up production, securing adequate supplies of inputs, coping with the still recurrent floods and droughts, absorbing and feeding urban immigrants. For the majority, living in poor areas, particularly barren upland communes, “self-reliance” continued to mean both austerity and occasional disaster.

The drive to work was unremitting. For example, an article in the People’s Daily in 1975 stressed the need for family planning so that women are not “bogged down by their children and household chores”. [145] With family planning, “the attendance rate of the women labour force has been raised from the sixty per cent in the past to ninety-three per cent.” What kind of work did the women do when relieved of “household chores”? In Nanking county: “Within the army of more than 70,000 diggers of ditches, there were more than 60,000 women. Fearing neither hardships nor fatigue, they worked arduously for fifty days together with men, and had shifted 3,670,000 cubic metres of earth and completed the task of building 140 li of ditches ten days ahead of schedule.”

(v) Retrospect

What was the effect of the transformation of China’s land? For the average peasant, the ending of the perpetual wars, of gangsterism and banditry, of epidemic, and the worst severities of flood and sporadic famine, were tangible enough benefits. His children might now hope to secure an education, and his family some degree of medical care. The landlord had gone. The cultivator’s crop received a stable return and, with time, he could afford to make improvements to raise output. Industry made available other comforts to rural existence. Yet, important as these improvements were, they did not demonstrate that the Chinese Communist party was the party of the Chinese peasantry.

It seems reasonably clear from the record of the Communist party during the years of the People’s Republic that its leadership felt no particular commitment to the peasantry, no obligation to “represent” it as a class. On the contrary, the government made sporadic efforts to eliminate the peasantry, to convert it into a tightly administered labour force, tied to the land more closely than ever before. The poverty of China, its intensive agriculture, the weakness of the administrative structure made it impossible to persist in this course for very long. The peasants refused to relinquish the products of the soil. Then State policy went into reverse, permitting the restoration of the “rich peasant economy”. When that threatened the rural authority, the State swung back towards stricter administration, and so on, an endless series of zigzags to escape from the imperatives of backwardness and build a powerful national economy.

The drive to increase rural output – which did not rule out a slow and modest improvement in rural living standards – did not flow from any “ideological preference”. On the contrary, the ideological formulations flowed from the efforts to sustain capital accumulation in peculiarly obdurate circumstances. For the majority there was little “emancipation” in this. The “emancipation” was, as Mao put it in the early years of the People’s Republic, of the “productive forces”.

It would appear, then, that the Communist party of China did not embody the class interests of either the working class or the peasantry. Its general political direction appears fully consistent throughout the period from the 1930s to the present, even if its immediate tactical responses vary. That direction of course represented interests that, it could be claimed, all classes shared – national unity, order, stability and the possibility of improving living standards – but no class interests specific to the exploited. On the other hand, the party did not represent the other two major classes – capitalists and landlords. Although it was indulgent towards landlord interests in the 1940s and capitalist interests in the l940s. and 1950s, it ultimately liquidated both as classes. It did so for material reasons, rather than ideological preferences. The landlords represented Kuomintang and warlord power on the land and were therefore a threat to the party in the rural areas (but not in the cities) and would be an obstacle to centralizing authority over the rural population; the capitalists encroached upon the public sector and jeopardized State control of the urban labour force, thus affecting the party’s main priority, accumulation, the basis for building a powerful national State.

On the argument so far, it would seem that Marx, Lenin and the Marxists generally were wrong in the estimate that a political party has automatically an organic relationship with one or another major class. Here was a party apparently without a class basis. However, before we take up this theme, we need to look at another argument. A number of claims have been made about the People’s Republic – that in the 1950s, by its reorganization of Chinese society, it was able to conquer the problem of economic backwardness with qualitatively more success than other countries; that because of the transformation, the party created a society moving steadily towards complete equality and fundamental democracy. If all three contentions are correct, it becomes clear that the Marxists were wrong in another way – in their estimation that only the industrial working class could achieve these purposes in the modern world.

Notes

105. Lenin, The agrarian question in Russia, CW (4th Russian) 15, pp.57-8, cited Gluckstein, op. cit., p.83

106. Provisional Government, statement, 19 March 1917, cited Cliff, Lenin, op. cit., II, p.208

107. Ibid., 21 April 1917, cited ibid., p.209

108. CW9, p.315

109. CW25, p.227

110. The agrarian reform law of the PRC, Peking 1951, pp.2-4

111. On the difficulties and anomalies, cf. Gluckstein, op.cit., pp.88-90

112. Agrarian reform law, op. cit., p.22

113. Chen Han-seng estimates 22% of large landlords of south Kiangsu were mainly engaged in trade in 1930 – The present agrarian problem in China, Shanghai, 1933, p.19; J.L. Buck estimates 31% of Szechuan landlords were also merchants – An agricultural survey of Szechuan province, (mimeo), Chungking, 1943, p.13, cited Gluckstein, p.89

114. Hsin Kuan Ch’a, Peking, 10 December 1950, CB 63

115. General Report, Peking Municipal People’s Government on Agrarian Reform in the Peking Suburban Areas, 21 November 1950, CB 72

116. Fanshen, A document of revolution in a Chinese village, New York, 1966, pp.605-6

117. See Robert Ash’s reconstruction of events and documentation, Economic aspects of land reform in Kiangsu, 1949-52, Pts.I & II, CQ 66 and 67, June and September 1976

118. Methods of implementing land reform in south Kiangsu, People’s Administration of Southern Kiangsu, 28 November 1950, Ash, ibid., I, p.289

119. New China’s Economic Achievements, 1949-1952, Peking, 1952, p.194

120. From I-nien-lai t’u kai-ko yün-tung ti ch’eng-chu, Hsinhua JP, 2 July 1951, p.3, and Hsinhua JP, 1 December 1951, p.2, cited Ash, op. cit., II, pp.521-2

121. Su-nan JP, Wusih, 1 January 1952, Ash, ibid., II, p.531

122. Shanghai, 14 July 1950, CB 10,29 September 1950

123. “The practices of indiscriminate beating, scolding, punishment, threats, arrests, etc., are frequently employed in promoting the work of collection” – Secretary, North East Bureau, 20 May 1951, Nang Fang JP, 9 June 1952, CB 158

124. New China’s Economic Achievements, op. cit., p.90

125. April 1956, Miscellany I, p.34; and 8 December 1956, ibid., p.41

126. GAC, Directive on the issuance of farm credit, 7 July 1953, NCNA Peking, 1 Sept. 1953, SCMP 645

127. Report on an investigation of conditions in five villages in an old Liberated Area in Shansi province, JMJP, II November 1951, CB 143

128. Liu Lan-t’ao, JMJP, 14 March 1953, SCMP 535

129. Kao K’ang, Overcome the corrosion of bourgeois ideology: oppose the rightist trend in the Party, JMJP, 24 January 1952, CB 163, 5 March 1952

130. On agricultural co-operation, op. cit., pp.18-19

131. Chen Yun, NCNA Peking, 21 June 1955; volume of rent formerly paid, in NCNA, 18 September 1952; cf. also Chen Han-seng, China Reconstructs, January-February 1953

132. Chen Yun, NCNA Peking, 10 March 1957; cf. also: “cattle slaughtered this year [1955] has shown an increase of more than seventy per cent compared with same period last year, and calves constitute a very large portion of the animals slaughtered” – Ta KungPao, Tientsin, 21 December 1955, SCMP 1200

133. 8th Party Congress, 17 May 1958, in Miscellany I, p.102, and II, p.237

134. Sixth Plenum, September 1955, Miscellany I, p.15

135. Feb 1959, in Miscellany I, p.157

136. 1959, in Miscellany II, p.313

137. Ibid., p.253

138. JMJP, 22 October 1971

139. Radio broadcasts, Hupeh 11, 24 February and 2 March 1975, Kansu, 16 February 1975, Kiangsu, 16 February 1975, in Current Scene XIII, 3-4, March-April 1975

140. Secretary of a County Party Committee, cited Changchun radio (Kirin), 28 July 1975, SWB 4973/BII/8

141. Liu Cheng-sung, of Niulantaotzu production brigade, Wuchiang County, Hopei, Shihchiachuang radio, Hopei, 18 August 1975, SWB 4989/BII/10, 23 August 1975

142. Ming Pau, 23 December 1975, in Translations of PRC 299, JPRS 63125, 21 January 1976, pp.9-10

143. 13 December 1963, in Mao Papers, p.88; cf. also Miscellany II, p.252

144. A point made by Kuang-ming JP, 17 April 1975, SCMP 5845, 5 May 1975; cf. also Shih Ta, JMJP, 3 April 1975, SCM? 5844, 2 May 1975, and Kuang-ming JP, 19 May 1975, SCMP 75-23, 2-6 January 1976

145. JMJP, 14 April 1975, SCMP 5841, 29 April 1975