Big Four Cleans”

SEVEN Local Variations in the “Big Four Cleans” The course of the Socialist Education Movement took an unexpected and dramatic turn over the summer of 1964. In the fall of 1963, Wang Guangmei, the spouse of then-president Liu Shaoqi, volunteered to par- ticipate in a “Four Cleans” work team headed for the Taoyuan brigade in Hebei’s Funing county. Her decision to do so was apparently not a popular one within the upper echelons of the Beijing leadership. In April 1967, reflecting on the events that preceded her being “sent down” to the countryside, Wang would admit: “Many people were against my going to Taoyuan; only Liu Shaoqi . [and] Chairman Mao backed me up.” Nevertheless, in November 1963, Wang adopted the pseudonym Dong Pu, and, carrying personal documents that identified her as an employee of the Hebei Provincial Public Security Department (Gongan ting) and clad in the clothing of an ordinary worker, she departed Beijing for Taoyuan. Although she originally intended to remain in Funing county for three months, the normal period of service for “Four Cleans” work teams at the time, she reported that “the more we did, the more complicated [the situation] became; in actuality we took five months to carry out [the movement], and only then had we carried it out thoroughly.” In her report to the Central Committee on her experiences in Taoyuan, delivered on July 5, 1964, but more widely disseminated in September of that year, 1. Richard Baum, Prelude to Revolution: Mao, the Party and the Peasant Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 89. 2. Wang Guangmei, “(Zhuanfa) ‘Guangyu yige dadui de shehui zhuyi jiaoyu yundong de jingyan zongjie’ de pishi” (Summary of the experiences of a production brigade in the socialist education movement) (September 1, 1964), in Pipan ziliao: Zhongguo He Luxiao fu Liu Shaoqi fangeming xiuzheng zhuyi yanlun ji (Critique: the collected counter-revolutionary revisionist speeches of China’s He Luxiao, spouse of Liu Shaoqi) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1967), pp. 472–74. 166 CHAPTER SEVEN Wang painted a bleak portrait of local-level politics in the Chinese countryside, and of the Socialist Education Movement as it was then being implemented. In short, her report argued that the “Four Cleans” movement was being hastily carried out in most areas, barely scratching the surface of what she perceived to be a complex web of petty corruption, graft, and counter-revolutionary activities and attitudes that ensnared local cadres and ordinary commune members alike. The processes of socialist production and political mobilization in the rural communities beneath and around the roots of the party were poisoned by widespread dissimulation, feigned compliance, and subterfuge. Furthermore, this web of corruption extended much fur- ther up the bureaucratic hierarchy than previously expected. In contrast to the earlier assumptions of the “First Ten Points” and “Later Ten Points,” both of which suggested that upward of 95 percent of the basic-level rural cadres and residents were fundamentally good and treading the correct path, Wang’s investigations uncovered malfeasance in the performance of more than half of all the local officials she examined, including principal cadres such as the secretary and deputy secretary of the brigade party branch. In a letter written by Liu Shaoqi to Wang in the spring of 1964, Liu concluded on the basis of her account that “The Taoyuan party branch basically does not belong to the party . it is basically a two-faced counter-revolutionary regime.” Liu instructed Wang to “publicly criticize, struggle against, and where necessary dismiss and replace the ‘rotten’ cadres in the brigade.” As a result, 40 out of 47 brigade and production-team cadres in Taoyuan, or 85 percent of the total, received some sort of sanction, resulting in a virtually complete turnover in local political leadership. Wang Guangmei’s widely publicized experiences set in motion a chain of events that was to alter the progress of the Socialist Education Movement and moreover opened the way for the massive inversions of political power that occurred during the Cultural Revolution. One immediate consequence of Wang Guangmei’s Taoyuan report was the release of a new document that dictated several key changes in the implementation of the Socialist Education Movement and the “Four Cleans” campaign policies being pursued in the countryside. In August 1964, shortly before Wang’s findings were made widely available, Mao lamented: “In our state at present approximately one-third of the power is in the hands of the enemy or of the enemy’s sympathizers. We have been going for fifteen years and we now control two-thirds of the realm. At present you can buy a [party] branch secretary for a few packs of cigarettes, not 3. Baum (1975), p. 86..

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