Yundong: Mass Movements in Chinese Communist Leadership a Publication of the Center for Chinese Studies University of California, Berkeley, California 94720
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Yundong: Mass Movements in Chinese Communist Leadership A publication of the Center for Chinese Studies University of California, Berkeley, California 94720 Cover Colophon by Shih-hsiang Chen Although the Center for Chinese Studies is responsible for the selection and acceptance of monographs in this series, respon sibility for the opinions expressed in them and for the accuracy of statements contained in them rests with their authors. @1976 by the Regents of the University of California ISBN 0-912966-15-7 Library of Congress Catalog Number 75-620060 Printed in the United States of America $4.50 Center for Chinese Studies • CHINA RESEARCH MONOGRAPHS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY NUMBER TWELVE YUNDONG: MASS CAMPAIGNS IN CHINESE COMMUNIST LEADERSHIP GORDON BENNETT 4 Contents List of Abbreviations 8 Foreword 9 Preface 11 Piny in Romanization of Familiar Names 14 INTRODUCTION 15 I. ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT 19 Background Factors 19 Immediate Factors 28 Development after 1949 32 II. HOW TO RUN A MOVEMENT: THE GENERAL PATTERN 38 Organizing a Campaign 39 Running a Compaign in a Single Unit 41 Summing Up 44 III. YUNDONG IN ACTION: A TYPOLOGY 46 Implementing Existing Policy 47 Emulating Advanced Experience 49 Introducing and Popularizing a New Policy 55 Correcting Deviations from Important Public Norms 58 Rectifying Leadership Malpractices among Responsible Cadres and Organizations 60 Purging from Office Individuals Whose Political Opposition Is Excessive 63 Effecting Enduring Changes in Individual Attitudes and Social Institutions that Will Contribute to the Growth of a Collective Spirit and Support the Construction of Socialism 66 IV. DEBATES OVER THE CONTINUING VALUE OF YUNDONG 75 Rebutting the Critics: Arguments in Support of Campaign Leadership 80 V. RESPONSES BY NONELITES: THE QUESTION OF COMPLIANCE 86 VI. CONCLUSION 92 APPENDIX: The Land Reform Campaign- Manchuria, 1946-47 101 Selected Annotated Bibliography 122 Glossary 125 Index 131 Wave After Wave by Rewi Alley With white foam waves break and dash eagerly up the strand lapping around the children who play and laugh making the long beach a live thing in its changing beauty. Watching these and the sturdy fishermen hauling boats ashore one thinks over the wave after wave of people's movements that have pounded the shores of privilege then after dumping flotsam, have returned gaily to mother sea again. August 20, 1968 Beidaihe (from Ta Kung Pao Weekly Supplement, Hongkong, September 26, 1968) LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED IN TEXT AND NOTES CB Current Background, U.S. Consulate General, Hongkong CCP Chinese Communist Party JPRS Joint Publications Research Service NCNA New China News Agency, Beijing PLA People's Liberation Army SCMM Selections from China Mainland Magazines, U.S. Consulate General, Hongkong SCMP Survey of China Mainland Press, U.S. Consulate General, Hongkong Foreword One of the most frequently encountered metaphors in the writings of Mao Zedong likens the course of revolution to the movement of waves. The movement of a revolutionary cause, Mao tells us, is by no means al ways a forward one; revolutions move through ebbs and flows, advances and retreats. The revolutionary is often depicted as battling waves in his attempt to make forward progress. Whether this metaphor derives from the experience of the Chinese Communist Party in guerrilla warfare dur ing its formative years or from the concepts of the dialect itself, it is a particularly important idea that has determined the course of post- Liberation Chinese politics, and which is thus indispensable to an under standing of that course. The most important manifestation of this idea in contemporary Chinese political life is the yundong, or mobilizational campaign. So im portant is it, indeed, that the "campaign style" has given a distinctive character to the Chinese political system, as compared with nonsocialist or even other socialist political systems. Despite its importance, however, neither the Chinese themselves nor outside observers ofChina have devoted sustained attention to the idea of the campaign or to the history of its implementation in post-Liberation China. Gordon Bennett is particularly well qualified to correct this omission. Along with a handful of others, Professor Bennett combines a thorough knowledge of the documentary sources on contemporary Chinese politics with a highly developed ability to interview former residents of the People's Republic. Using the information and viewpoints garnered from these two disparate sources, he is able to produce a synthetic work of considerably greater reliability than those that derive from a single type of source material. This ability was manifested first in the book, Red Guard: The Political Biography of Dai Siao-ai, the story of a Red Guard, which Professor Bennett wrote in collaboration with Ronald Montaperto. It is clearly manifested as well in the present work. Professor Bennett has written: Yundong with two audiences in mind, mind. His book synthesizes in a new way primary source material on the mobilizational campaign, a subject that has not been separately treated previously except in article form. As a result, this work will be of con siderable interest and importance to the specialist in contemporary Chinese politics. But the book has also been addressed to the student who is just beginning his or her study of contemporary China. Because the campaigns in retrospect provide not only a key to understanding Chinese political style, but also a means of periodizing contemporary Chinese political history, it is clear that this work will find an important place in the classroom as well. During several periods of residence at the Center for Chinese Studies at Berkeley, Professor Bennett has contributed substantially to the Center's intellectual vitality. His long association with the Center makes it particularly fitting that this book be published as one of the China Research Monographs. John Bryan Starr, Vice-Chairman Centerfor Chinese Studies Berkeley, California May 1975 10 Preface The literature on China's modern day political culture abounds with case studies of individual mass campaigns, but no general and comprehensive discussion on the subject is anywhere to be found. In spite of abundant documentary evidence that mass movements are a critical component of Chinese Communist leadership, they are barely mentioned per se in comprehensive works such as John Lewis's Leadership in Communist China (Ithaca, 1963), Franz Schurmann's Ideology and Organization in Communist China (Berkeley, 1966), James Townsend's Political Par ticipation in Communist China (Berkeley, 1968), or China's Developmental Experience, edited by Michel Oksenberg (New York, 1973). Moreover, despite the obvious fact that mass campaigns continue to flourish, prominent reports by recent visitors to China mention them only briefly, if at all. Masanori Tabata's account of his China trip {Japan Times, August 25, 1975) is the exception that proves the rule. One possible explanation for this development is overfamiliarity. One can scarcely peruse a single issue of Peking Review or People's Daily with out reading about some campaign or other, big or small, countrywide or local; thus, many observers have come to regard the technique as com monplace, and the ordinary rarely recommends itself for analysis. A second possible explanation is universality. Especially since the early 1940s, the history of communism in China has been filled with literally hundreds of mass movements; the task of writing about them seems hopelessly intertwined with an analysis of the entire history of the period. How can bounds be placed around such a fluid subject that so easily permeates other sectors of society? Issues raised by members of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) suggest a third explanation. According to the CCAS- inspired argument, the liberal-democratic ideological commitment of most Western scholars predisposes them to disregard the political in stitutions characteristic of nonliberal, mobilizational democracy. Such an intellectual posture causes them to focus on political institutions ex clusively as instruments of leadership rather than inquiring as well into their benefits to lower reaches of society. The failure of China! Inside the People'sRepublic, a collective report by the first CCAS friendship delega tion to the People's Republic, itself to discuss mass campaigns seems to weaken this argument; at the same time, a CCAS-oriented sociologist, Charles Cell, has prepared the first full-length empirical study of cam paigns. Yet a fourth possible explanation asserts the essential nonexistence of the topic. The Chinese lend the term "campaign" to a variety of events much too diverse, some would argue, for just one category. A small cam paign to pay agricultural taxes on time in Zunhua xian, Hebei province, for example, is inappropriately thrown together with a nationwide cam paign for all circles to repudiate the allegedly anti-Party works of the writer Hu Feng. The two appear different enough in both scope and process to justify completely separate handling. Methodologically, taking "mass campaigns" as a single institutional unit of analysis is appealing. Unlike "policies," which come and go in response to only partly knowable stimuli; "decision-making," which takes place largely behind closed doors; "elites" with complements only partly visible to researchers; or "informal groupings" such as factions, which have relentlessly defied almost every effort to obtain empirical glimpses,