Shanghai's Dispossessed the Capitalist Problem in Socialist Transition, 1956–1981

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Shanghai’s Dispossessed

The Capitalist Problem in Socialist Transition, 1956–1981

Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philosophischen Fakultät der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg im Breisgau

vorgelegt von Puck Engman aus Stockholm

Sommersemester 2020 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Daniel Leese

Zweitgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Nicola Spakowski

Drittgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Sabine Dabringhaus

Vorsitzender des Promotionsausschusses der Gemeinsamen Kommission der Philologischen und der Philosophischen Fakultät:

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Bernd Kortmann

Datum der mündlichen Prüfung: 15. Oktober 2020 Summary

It was only with the transition to socialism that capitalists appeared in China as a state category. While university students and labor activists had introduced the concept of the bourgeoisie in the early twentieth century to make sense of society’s industrial reorganization, the Chinese Communist Party’s expropriation of private industrial and commercial enterprise in the 1950s elevated capitalist identity to administrative-legal status. The capitalist status became a necessity when the government took the capitalist population as a target for socialist management and transformation. For if the dispossession of the bourgeoisie had put an end to its existence as a class in the Marxist sense, the same development required the bureaucracy to be able to identify capitalists on an individual level so as to ﬁnd a suitable place for them in the socialist workplace and urban society.

The history of how the government worked to define and solve the problem of capitalists shows that Chinese socialism was as concerned with the differentiation from an illegitimate past as with the reorganization of economic production. This dissertation finds evidence of this process of differentiation in the political and bureaucratic practices that targeted capitalists in the city of Shanghai. It argues that the classification of capitalists was not a high-modernist project forcing local realities into rigorous and artificial categories but rather the expression of a political effort to reconcile a socialist commitment to end the social injustices of the past with the demands of industrial growth and national defense. As the

ﬁrst socialist government to abolish private ownership while recognizing the bourgeoisie’s historical entitlement as an ally in the struggle against imperialism, the Chinese state came to organize capitalists as a population with a liminal but legitimate place within the socialist

II community of production.

Triangulating previously unexamined sources from state archives and research collections, the dissertation demonstrates how political and bureaucratic responses to complex issues of entitlement and belonging came together in a shaky arrangement that allowed the capitalists’ inclusion in the community even as it reiﬁed their difference. Full of inherent tensions, this institutional arrangement ﬁnally broke down in the Cultural Revolution after widespread calls for more radical solutions to the capitalist problem. Without reliable support from the party leadership, however, these solutions proved no more successful than earlier policies. Only after the death of Mao did the leadership abolish the category of capitalists, closing the book on revolution and declaring the bourgeoisie a thing of the past—even as it enlisted former capitalists in its program of economic reform and opening- up.

III Contents

Summary II

Preface IX

Note on standards XII

Abbreviations XIV

Introduction 1

The capitalist reverse-engineered ...... 5

The difference socialism made ...... 14

From Marxist abstraction to actually existing class ...... 18

Toward a history of differentiation ...... 25

The Shanghai of the archives ...... 30

Overview ...... 35

1 Bourgeois types 38

1.1 On the bureaucrat-bourgeoisie ...... 40

1.2 A category without demography ...... 50

1.3 From friend-enemy distinction… ...... 53

1.4 … to public-private management ...... 59

1.5 The signiﬁcance of “painless delivery” ...... 66

1.6 Rights and rightists in socialist transition ...... 72

IV 2 Working through exploitation 79

2.1 What place for cotton traders in the system of production? ...... 83

2.2 The Penglai standards ...... 86

2.3 A distinction that has lost or is losing its meaning ...... 92

2.4 Classiﬁcation after all ...... 97

2.5 Capitalist by his own account ...... 99

2.6 Problems both past and present ...... 103

2.7 When Mao’s check bounced ...... 109

3 Threshold economy 113

3.1 Perpetual rehabilitation ...... 116

3.2 The capitalist and the commune ...... 119

3.3 Famine and favor ...... 122

3.4 The demography of a stratiﬁed class ...... 128

3.5 The economic organization of difference ...... 135

3.6 The breakdown of the capitalist realm ...... 143

4 Standards of entitlement 149

4.1 A temporary home for the “olds” ...... 152

4.2 How ownership matters were postponed until further notice ...... 157

4.3 Even reactionary things get wet in the rain ...... 159

4.4 The Shanghai Reception Group ...... 166

4.5 TheSixth Type ...... 171

4.6 Restitution in the corrective mode ...... 175

4.7 Whatdoesitmeanto chuli the past? ...... 179

5 Differentiation work 184

5.1 Urban repositories of ﬁlth ...... 186

5.2 The Beijiao Timber Mill ...... 195

V 5.3 Shanghai and its insufﬁciently capitalist ...... 199

5.4 The nature of the Gang of Four’s “sabotage” ...... 206

5.5 Getting rid of seven hundred thousand capitalists ...... 208

5.6 The bureaucratic process of recognition ...... 213

5.7 A quick ﬁx to a lingering problem ...... 218

Conclusion 221

An invitation to lunch ...... 222

Present from past ...... 227

Archival sources 230

State archives ...... 230

Research collections ...... 238

Illustration credits 246

Bibliography 247

Appendix 283

VI List of Tables

0.1 Number of investors in Shanghai and Tianjin grouped according to 1956

value of investment ...... 16

0.2 Number of investors per sector grouped according to 1956 value of invest-

ment, Shanghai only ...... 16

2.1 Penglai’s two standards for classifying capitalists ...... 90

3.1 Bourgeois industrialists and merchants by type, Shanghai 1963 ...... 131

3.2 Bourgeois industrialists and merchants by sex and age, Shanghai 1963 .... 132

3.3 Bourgeois industrialists and merchants by dividends and salaries, Shanghai

1963 ...... 134

4.1 Reported number of households raided in selected cities, August–October 1966156

4.2 Nanjing’s taxonomy of ”other lawless elements” in comparison ...... 174

5.1 Typology of non-capitalist proprietors ...... 212

VII List of Figures

0.1 Guo Dihuo arriving in Beijing for the CPPCC ...... 3

0.2 Mao Zedong’s 1925 tabulation of the social classes in China ...... 10

1.1 Caricature of bureaucrat-capital blaming wages for driving up inﬂation ... 44

1.2 Fourfold schematization of the Chinese bourgeoisie (Qunzhong 1948) ..... 47

1.3 “A Night to Rejoice,” Hangzhou, 1956 ...... 70

2.1 Voting at the Eighth Party Congress ...... 93

3.1 Shanghai Mutual Aid Fund receipt from July 1966 (facsimile) ...... 141

4.1 Institutions involved in the work with conﬁscated goods in Shanghai .... 160

4.2 Recto-verso of coupon for procurement of looted goods ...... 162

5.1 Number of capitalists per province before and after differentiation ...... 210

6.1 Wax recreation of Deng Xiaoping’s lunch with Hu Juewen, Hu Ziang, Rong

Yiren, Gu Gengyu, and Zhou Shutao ...... 223

VIII Preface

This dissertation takes a rather straight path from beginning to end. There will be some detours, probably even some unnecessary stops, but there is hopefully a discernible logic to the steps by which the argument advances. At the very least, the guided tour offered to the reader should prove less bewildering than the roundabout route taken by the author.

The intellectual journey that led here began where the text ends: in the years that saw China bid farewell to revolution. The Maoist legacy was the focus of the research project led by

Daniel Leese, with generous funding from the European Research Council, that I joined in

2014.1 My work for the project introduced me to the extensive literature on transitional justice. In the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the protests in Tiananmen Square, a great many activists, lobbyists, and scholars have engaged with this topic, producing a body of texts that is equal parts policy analysis and policy advising. Much of the Freiburg team’s work has been concerned with teasing out from a literature fraught with normative assumptions some elements that could be useful for a critical and effective history of how

China engaged with historical injustice. The work I present here is the product of the many discussions that we have had over the years.

Among the many debts incurred along the way, the ﬁrst one is thus to the members of the Freiburg team. As project leader and mentor, Daniel Leese has given me all opportunities to grow as a historian and given me full support even when my research took me in unexpected directions. I have beneﬁted greatly from daily discussions with Zhang Man

1 The Maoist Legacy: Party Dictatorship, Transitional Justice and the Politics of Truth (FP7/2007-2013, ERC grant agreement n° 336202)

IX and Song Guoqing, the two other doctoral students in the project; they have helped ﬁll countless holes in my knowledge and pushed my research in new directions. Since joining the project, Amanda Shuman has been generous with both encouragement and criticism.

Without Wang Baigulahu, there would have been no sources, no project, and nothing for me to write about. Thomas Kaiser was a supportive presence in the delicate early months of this research. I also owe special thanks to the graduate student researchers who have put time and energy into the project over the years: Chen Shaoqi, Gong Buyun, Hao Jingx- uan, Paulina Hölblingová, Edward Hillier, Sebastian Krauskopf, Lin Sijia, Tabea Mühlbach,

Jessy Ng, Jancoe Pie, Pu Shi, Tan Yuan, Lily Yueran Tian, Yan Menghan, Wu Chia-yi, and

Xu Mengxin.

I have been exceptionally lucky with my mentors. This is true not just for my time in Freiburg but for the path that led here. First there was Michael Schoenhals who has guided me over the years and shaped my understanding of what a scholar is and should be. It is a privilege to be counted among his students. Then there was Yves Chevrier who kindly accepted me as a student and directed me, gently but insistently, to move beyond the sources.

The list of the people and institutions who have contributed to this work is impossi- bly long. Here, I can only mention a few. My discussions with fellow students at the

University of Freiburg have been extremely valuable. I am thinking especially of Damian

Mandżunowski and Jennifer Stapornwongkul as well as the doctoral students who participated in our colloquiums. Nicola Spakowski, who organized these colloquiums, has given important feedback at key moments. In the later stages of my work, I was fortunate to present one of my chapters to Lena Henningsen and her research team. Last but not least, thanks are due to two temporary colleagues: Elisabeth Forster and Dayton Lekner.

Among the many visitors to the University of Freiburg over the years, Timothy Cheek deserves special mention for listening to me present my work and helping me adjust and hone my arguments. Mark Czellér gave incisive comments on a draft chapter. I have beneﬁted greatly from the opportunity to present my work in a series of workshops orga-

X nized between Daniel Leese in Freiburg, Felix Wemheuer in Cologne, and Susanne Weigelin-

Schwiedrzik in Vienna. I am also grateful to Isabelle Thireau and Sebastian Veg for inviting

me to speak about my research at my old school in Paris.

During my multiple research stays in China, I depended on the kindness of researchers

and staff at several institutions. At Fudan University, Jin Guangyao and Dong Guoqiang were not only instrumental in securing the necessary institutional afﬁliation but also helped

me collect research materials and access to archives both in Shanghai and elsewhere. From

Jiaotong University, my thanks go out to Cao Shuji and his students Liu Shigu and Zheng

Binbin. It is hard to imagine someone more generous than Jiang Huajie at the East China

Normal University in giving me his time and expertise. Also at East China Normal Uni- versity, I owe thanks to Han Gang for personally assuring my access to the Center for

Contemporary Documents and Historical Materials as well as Zhao Jin for sharing with

me some of his knowledge of capitalists and socialist transformation. I received a kind wel-

come from the history department at Yunnan University and valuable assistance from Chen

Hongmin at Zhejiang University. I would also like to thank the staff at the Shanghai Munic-

ipal Archives, Hanghzou Municipal Archives, Beijing Municipal Archives, and Hangzhou

Municipal Archives for their help with navigating the collections. In Hong Kong, I had

help from the staff at the CUHK Universities Service Center for China Studies and Gao Qi

in particular.

Kicki Thurfjell carefully read through each and every chapter and helped me correct

several embarrassing oversights. All remaining errors are mine.

My deepest thanks to Aurélia M. Ishitsuka who has been my constant interlocutor and

the ﬁrst to hear my ideas. And to Baya—I am forever in your debt.

XI Note on standards

Characters and romanization

This work uses the standard character set of the People’s Republic of China: the simpliﬁed characters that were gradually introduced in the 1950s and 1960s. For transcription of these characters, it relies on the ofﬁcial romanization system of the People’s Republic of China, the pinyin system, as developed in the 1950s. As such, it keeps to the standards prescribed in “Basic rules of the Chinese phonetic alphabet orthography” GB/T 16159-2012. I keep to the pinyin system even for personal names where alternative romanization styles have otherwise become common.

Translation

Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. I aim for ﬁdelity in translation, understood here as preserving the author’s choice of words and sentence structure in the transmission from source to target text while also being mindful of voice and style. To this end, I generally avoid the introduction of new words in the target text and the omission of words present in the source text. Where changes do occur, they are marked by the use of brackets. An exception to this general rule has been made with regards to changes of punctuation as well as conjunctions that do not signiﬁcantly impact the meaning of the phrase (e.g. the insertion of “and” or “or” before the last item of a list). In these cases, changes are left unmarked.

XII Monetary units

The ofﬁcial currency of the People’s Republic of China is the renminbi 人民币 and the basic monetary unit is the yuan 元. In 1955, a reevaluation of the currency took place that exchanged the old renminbi for a new renminbi at the uniform rate of 10,000 yuan to 1 yuan. Unless stated otherwise, all sums expressed in yuan are in terms of the post-1955 currency.

XIII Abbreviations

BJMA: Beijing Municipal Archives

CCP: Chinese Communist Party

CPPCC: Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference

CUHK: Chinese University of Hong Kong / Universities Service Centre for China Studies

ECNU: East China Normal University / Center for Contemporary Documents and Histor- ical Materials

FIC: Federation of Industry and Commerce

HZMA: Hangzhou Municipal Archives

MLC: Maoist Legacy Collection

MLD: Maoist Legacy Database

Minjian: China National Democratic Construction Association

PLA: People’s Liberation Army

PRC: People’s Republic of China

SHMA: Shanghai Municipal Archives

SZMA: Suzhou Municipal Archives

ZZGSYSG: Zhonggguo zibenzhuyi gongshangye de shehuizhuyi gaizao

XIV Introduction

Ask people to think of capitalists and they are likely to conjure up a mental image dating

back to the early twentieth century, when the global expansion of capitalism made the bour-

geois ﬁgure relevant for all who found themselves subjected to industrial life. By the cen-

tury’s midpoint, state socialism had appeared as a real alternative and with it the promise

of industrial modernity without the bourgeoisie at the pinnacle of the societal pyramid.

Against such a background, it is not hard to understand the surprise of First World visitors

upon encountering in a place they knew as Red China afﬂuent business people whose ex-

travagant lifestyles and worldly manners corresponded so closely to the capitalist ﬁgure of

their minds. “Disconcerting” was the word used by a Canadian associate professor, on a visit to Shanghai in May 1966, to sum up the feeling of being “picked up by a native Chi-

nese capitalist in a new Jaguar, taken to his large factory for a day of discussions, and later

to his sumptuous home, where he still lives as a wealthy industrialist does in a capitalistic

nation.”2 It was uncanny not because it was unfamiliar, but precisely because this foreign world appeared so much like his own.

The discombobulated visitor, Barry Richman, had set out on his trip with a clear goal: he wanted to understand how the socialist country went about the management of productive

enterprise. Richman’s working assumption, clearly laid out in the introduction to his pub-

lished ﬁndings, was that effective management was a constant in any growing economy, whether socialist or capitalist.3 What he had not expected, however, was to ﬁnd that the

2 Richman, Industrial Society in Communist China, 894; see also Richman, “Capitalists and Managers.” 3 Richman, Industrial Society in Communist China, xvi.

1 lifestyle, attitude, and background of managers were also consistent across systems.

The Jaguar owner, Wu Zhongyi, became Richman’s guide to what the visitor called the

“strange world of China’s capitalists.”4 Mao Zedong’s Communist Party built and maintained this peculiar realm which, against the odds, survived the many upheavals of the

ﬁrst thirty years of the People’s Republic. Later, when new party leaders stepped up efforts to open to the First World, the liminality of this space made it an ideal intersection between Chinese socialism and global capitalism. Three years after the Great Helmsman’s death, French historian Marie-Claire Bergère sat down for an interview across a man sport- ing “gilded pens, an elegant watch and Italian-style shoes that ﬁt badly with the austere

Mao suit.”5 The man with the pens was none other than Rong Yiren—the “red capitalist” of an immensely successful industrialist family from Wuxi who became China’s vice president in 1993 and whose son continues to make it onto the list of the country’s wealthiest people.6 With their connections abroad, and across the straits to Taiwan and Hong Kong especially, men like Rong became ambassadors for a brand of socialism that welcomed capitalist investment.

Fifty years after Richman’s visit, historians still struggle to reconcile the lavish lifestyle of members of the prerevolutionary elite with the overall account of a regime whose professed goal was the elimination of the bourgeoisie. In a recent study, Lu Hanchao concludes that bourgeois privilege is evidence of “the complexity and paradox” of the Chinese socialist system.7 In his view, extravagant consumer patterns constituted forms of “everyday resistance” and provide evidence of the “resilience and elasticity of Chinese society” in the face of a hostile state power.8 Like many historians of the period, he assumes a neat divide

4 Richman, 900. 5 Bergère, Capitalismes et capitalistes, 213. 6 In 2018, Rong Zhijian, the son, had a reported net worth of twelve billion yuan, making him China’s 286th wealthiest person, see Inc, “Hurun China Rich List”; in this, he is similar to the signiﬁcant proportion of China’s economic elite who descends from pre-1949 local elites, see Goodman, Class in Contemporary China, 188; two quantitative studies of status inheritance in the twentieth-century have found remarkably low rates of social mobility in China, comparable to countries that did not undergo revolution or socialist transformation, Clark, The Son Also Rises, 174–5; Campbell and Lee, “Kinship and the Long-Term Persistence of Inequality in Liaoning, China, 1749–2005.” 7 Lu, “Bourgeois Comfort Under Proletarian Dictatorship.” 8 Lu, 5.

2 Figure 0.1: Guo Dihuo arriving in Beijing for the CPPCC

3 between state and society and considers socialism as an evolution of the state imposed on society.9 Consequently, the strange world of Chinese capitalists is understood as separate from and anterior to the socialist system.

From the vantage point of the external observer, the analytical challenge of the strange world is that it does not ﬁt with what we already know about Chinese socialism. But in seeking a quick explanation for the problem in relation to established frames of reference, there is a lost opportunity to critically evaluate received knowledge in light of new observations. We end up with a story of Chinese socialism indistinguishable from the one that we are familiar with and the strange world remains both strange and separate from the whole.

The task at hand is an investigation of what the capitalist problem may reveal about the system known as Chinese socialism. This requires a shift toward a descriptive approach to the problem and opens up to a new set of questions: In what did the capitalists constitute a problem? Who were responsible for deﬁning the problem and its solution? What was the status of this problem when compared to a number of other issues calling for attention?

Most fundamentally, this study asks: what set capitalists apart? Working toward an answer to these questions requires attention to the appearance of bureaucratic practices and norms in response to a new urgency to distinguish capitalists. It was socialism that provided this urgency.

This dissertation deals with the articulation of the capitalist problem in socialist transition. In the Marxist sense, the dispossession of the capitalist class put an end to its existence or, in the interpretations adopted in the People’s Republic of China, began a process of extinction that would be completed once its class consciousness had been truly reformed.

Yet from the point of view of the bureaucracy, the elimination of private industry meant the assimilation of the capitalists into the state organization and consequently introduced the need to distinguish capitalists at the individual level. Capitalist now became a class to which one could be ascribed. The capitalist problem, then, refers to a matter that concerned the party leaders and state functionaries responsible for designing and implementing a pol-

9 Werner, “Turning Back to Totality.”

4 icy toward the capitalist population. The bureaucratic process to manage capitalist differ-

ence was ongoing, a constant undercurrent of urban governance, but the degree of political

attention it received varied dramatically in the period between the socialist transformation

of industry in the mid-1950s through the end of the 1970s. Before turning to the relation be-

tween this political and administrative problem and the historical interpretation of Chinese

socialism, it is necessary to make clear how the use of the terms “class” and “capitalist” here

differs from earlier works.

The capitalist reverse-engineered

Just as the capitalist of our minds has taken on an anachronistic air, the structuralist framework that once made class a salient category recalls a bygone era. Today, the bourgeoisie

has lost much of its earlier appeal as a device for decoding China’s revolutionary history.10

Yet the strange world has come to attract attention from historians who want to under-

stand the lives of industrialist families who chose to stay on the mainland and their uneasy

relationship with the Communist Party.11 The study of “capitalists”—the added quotes in-

dicating that a category of practice has replaced an analytical one—is now undertaken by

scholars who peer beneath the structuralist account in search of agency, contingency, and

multiplicity.

The rejection of totalizing accounts has paved the way, notably, for the revival of the bi-

ography and prosopography in academic research. These genres retain the capitalist ﬁgure

only as a heuristic framing instrument—and even then with hesitation and qualiﬁcation. In

the collection of biographies entitled The Capitalist Dilemma in China’s Communist Revolution,

for example, several contributors insist that the subjects of their particular chapters were, in

the ﬁnal analysis, not capitalists.12 Upon closer inspection, the category that is supposed to

10 Especially interesting in this respect is Marie-Claire Bergère’s classic study of Shanghai’s bourgeoisie in its so- called golden age, which grew out of the collective project headed by Jean Chesneaux but made a clear break with its Marxist premises to produce a social history more attentive to representations of the social world in the local setting, see Bergère, L’âge d’or. 11 Notable examples include Cochran and Hsieh, The Lius of Shanghai; Feng, “Shenfen, yishi yu zhengzhi”; Kwan, Patriots’ Game; Sheehan, Industrial Eden; Yang, “Dui zichanjieji zhengce de yanbian.” 12 In Cochran, The Capitalist Dilemma in China’s Communist Revolution, 70, 91, 120.

5 frame the volume does not quite hold together. It is no surprise that the contributors have generally preferred harder objects—including professional groups, families, and ﬁrms—as the foundation for their own research projects.13

One strategy used by scholars to work around this fragility has been to shift entirely from the etic to the emic, which makes social class the category to be analyzed rather than the category of analysis. Highly productive, this constructivist line of research traces class as a social and political category and in so doing seeks to describe the development of a corresponding system of differentiation. In the study of China’s socialist past, one typically encounters this approach together with a distinct argument; namely that the Chinese Com- munist Party was able to impose its vision and categories on society through the domination of language and signs. Since the ﬁeld’s cultural turn, semiological power has been singled out as a particularly important factor in explaining both the party’s initial success and the resilience of its rule.14 Class, in this speciﬁc variation on the constructivist argument, was not just a social construct but a political one, which the Communist Party deployed to strengthen its control.15

This sort of reasoning underlies Christopher Leighton’s suggestion that a “lexical shift” led to the bourgeoisie’s appearance as a new collective identity in the 1950s: “Ascribed

first by the state and inscribed in the household registers, [capitalist identity] then derived meaning from institutions, a political party and a chamber of commerce designed to bring the business world within the framework of the Party-state, but grew most powerfully from the texts and images that those institutions created and circulated.”16 Through individual stories, organizations and firms, literature and film, Leighton paints a nuanced and illumi-

13 Some notable examples include Cochran and Hsieh, The Lius of Shanghai; Köll, From Cotton Mill to Business Empire; Sheehan, Trust in Troubled Times. 14 In the study of the People’s Republic of China, a seminal work is Apter and Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic, where the authors rely on Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault for theoretical inspiration, a continental approach that can be contrasted to Michael Schoenhals’ reliance on British anthropology and analytic philosophy in another groundbreaking study on the Chinese Communist Party’s formalized language use, see Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics. 15 The strongest version of this argument can be found in a series of studies by Eddy U, including “The Making of Zhishifenzi”; “What Was the Petty Bourgeoisie?”; “Rise of Marxist Classes”; and most recently Creating the Intellectual. 16 Leighton, “Capitalists, Cadres, and Culture,” 81–82.

6 nating panorama of the capitalists and their world in the 1950s. However, on the subject of the origin of the capitalists’ collective identity, he assumes rather than substantiates the position that it had its origin in state action and he passes quickly over the decisive issue of class ascription.17

Without further precision regarding the empirical procedures of class ascription and greater conceptual clarity as to the types of identities engendered in this way, statements to the effect that the Communist state created the bourgeoisie, or any other class, do little to advance our understanding of the state classification and its consequences. At a time when it has become a truism to say that something is socially constructed, scholars have made the case for finer distinctions in the study of identities, classification, and categories.18 One inspiration for thinking more carefully about how people build the worlds they inhabit has been the philosopher Nelson Goodman, who advances the thesis that worlds are made up of a number of relevant types and that we cannot (indeed, should not) reduce one form of categorization into another without eliminating the corresponding world altogether.19

His case for multiplicity, which is both a logical and an ethical argument, resonates with an inﬂuential postwar analysis—and a political and moral indictment—of the bureaucratic- industrial state that focuses on the technologies deployed to force the social world into unbending categories. We will soon return to this interpretation of the modern state and the signiﬁcance for the subject at hand. At the moment, what matters is the distinction between state ascription of identity, on the one hand, and the social formation of group identity through language and practice, on the other.

Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that a “lexical shift” produced capitalist identity, it is an odd choice to date this event to the 1950s. By all accounts, the capitalist en-

17 For the question of class ascription, Leighton relies on Lynn White’s 1977 piece on household registers and rations in the early years after the Communist takeover, but this study only mentions individual status and family origins in passing as part of a list of entries included in household registration forms, White, “Deviance,” 155. In the following, it will become clear why it is preferable to distinguish analytically between various orders of identiﬁcation, meaning, in this particular case, that the description of professional titles in early household registration records (a practice predating the People’s Republic) should be treated separately from the ascription of class status following the transition to socialism. 18 Prominent examples include Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond ’Identity’”; Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out; Hacking, Social Construction of What? 19 Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking.

7 tered into public debate long before the century’s midpoint.20 As early as the 1910s, Chinese anarchists and nationalists brought in, via Japan, the term “capitalist” (资本家 zibenjia) along with other keywords in the Marxist vocabulary of class.21 In Willibald Steinmetz’ schema to describe semantic change, this is referred to as an “irritation” brought about through the im- portation of words and concepts from a foreign language environment.22 For the Chinese of the early twentieth century, Japan was especially important as a source of such irritation in part due to widespread admiration for its successful modernization but especially because shared characters used for writing in the two languages eased the travel of words back-and- forth across semantic boundaries.23 Although young radicals were quick to mix in Marxist neologisms into their chic jargon, this did not yet amount to anything that could be called a shift in the broader discursive environment. Indeed, the initial use of such loanwords was eclectic, often serving as a fashionable gloss over “wholly traditional” concepts such as the classic dichotomy between those who labor with their minds and those who labor with their hands.24 But this changed over the following years as the alien terminology gained wider traction.

The language of class gained popularity in Chinese cities long before it became state ideology, because it captured the hierarchical organization of the industrial workplace. The

Marxist vocabulary of class became more widely accepted when it proved successful in bundling the experiences and expectations of the urban Chinese—Steinmetz calls this a

“gain in strategic practical value” (Zunahme des strategischen Gebrauchswert).25 Through the spread of capitalism as a mode of production and way of life, the global vocabulary of class won out over the “wholly traditional” categories, with the latter quickly losing semantic

20 Leighton touches on the earlier introduction of the term capitalist into the Chinese language, but insists that it became a way to “constantly and consistently” identify oneself and others in the 1950s, Leighton, “Capitalists, Cadres, and Culture,” 81. 21 Smith, Like Cattle and Horses, 129; drawing on Liu, Translingual Practice, 285. 22 Steinmetz, “Vierzig Jahre Begriffsgeschichte - The State of the Art,” 191. 23 Leese, “ ‘Revolution’,” 27. 24 Kuhn, “Chinese Views of Social Classiﬁcation,” 19. 25 Steinmetz, “Vierzig Jahre Begriffsgeschichte - The State of the Art,” 189.

8 plausibility.26 This process appears especially clearly in Stephen Smith’s work.27 Here, capitalism is described as a worldwide movement shaped by native responses and the language of class held to be enriched by local dialects. In China, class terminology grew to be more than just the chic jargon of the educated elite through collective responses to the new order—the strikes and protests of a nascent labor movement and in particular the May

30 Movement of 1925—and this also gave the new language its anti-imperialist accent.28

From a strategy of agitation that targeted foreign capitalists ﬁrst and foremost emerged a discourse that Smith terms “class-inﬂected anti-imperialism.”29 Here, the foreign capitalist became the perfect villain, embodying perfectly the theoretical linkage between the foreign powers’ oppression of the Chinese nation and the bourgeoisie’s oppression of workers.

The role of the native bourgeoisie, by contrast, was far more ambiguous. According to

Lenin’s “cardinal idea” of imperialism, the world was divided not just into exploiters and exploited but also into oppressor and oppressed nation.30 The Comintern pushed this idea upon the nascent Chinese Communist Party and ordered the newly formed cell to enter into an unequal and uneasy alliance with the Guomindang.31

The Chinese Communists developed the idea into the theory that there existed not one but two capitalist classes in China. The ﬁrst they named the “bureaucrat-bourgeoisie” for it was conceived as class of compradors who beneﬁted from its close ties to the imperial and then the Republican government to grow rich from their affairs with colonial powers

(see Chapter 2). The “national bourgeoisie,” by contrast, had deﬁed the odds to amass private wealth in a hostile environment dominated by such forces. Capitalist all the same,

Mao counted this group among the vacillating classes that might end up either as friends or enemies of the revolutionary movement.32 He drew up a schema that divided Chinese

26 Steinmetz, 188. 27 See especially Smith, Like Cattle and Horses; Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China. 28 Smith, Like Cattle and Horses, 129. 29 Smith, Like Cattle and Horses; see also Dirlik, “National Development and Social Revolution in Early Chinese Marxist Thought.” 30 Lenin, “Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial Questions,” 240. 31 See Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919-1927, 53–69; and also Pantsov and Levine, Mao, 107–8, 113–6. 32 Translations of Mao’s key texts on class and the national bourgeoisie, matters that only concerned him to the

9 society into ﬁve classes—the big bourgeoisie, middle bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, semiproletariat, and proletariat—that could be further subdivided based on their respective role in the system of production for a total of ﬁfteen categories (Figure 0.2). The table contained estimated numbers for each sub-category and described their respective attitudes toward the revolution.33

Figure 0.2: Mao Zedong’s 1925 tabulation of the social classes in China

extent that they were relevant for revolutionary strategy, can be found in Stuart Schram’s essential series of translations, see Mao, “Analysis of All the Classes in Chinese Society”; Mao, “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party”; Mao, “On New Democracy.” 33 The canonical version of this text that was published after 1949 was edited so as to substitute the division bureaucrat-bourgeoisie/national bourgeoisie for the big bourgeoisie/middle bourgeoisie distinction and the table was removed altogether, for reasons explained in Chapter 1.

10 The Communist Party’s thinking on the bourgeoisie, and class generally, began not as

social theory but revolutionary strategy. The party named this strategy of national unity

against colonial aggression the “united front” (统一战线 tongyi zhanxian). The First United

Front, which was the term used for the collaboration between the Communist Party and the

Guomindang, ended with a massacre of communist sympathizer and labor activists in 1927 which forced the survivors into a ten-year period of rural exile. In the mountains, the Com-

munists had little use for a strategy toward the bourgeoisie and little time for developing

its theory of urban revolution. Only after the 1936 kidnapping of the Guomindang leader

Jiang Jieshi by two of his generals, who released Jiang only when his party agreed to form a

Second United Front with the Communists to stand against the Japanese occupation, were

there any new contributions. In the winter of 1939/40, Mao made an important amend-

ment to the theory of the national bourgeoisie and its role in and after the revolution when

he penned two of the key texts of the Yan’an era: “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese

Communist Party” and “On New Democracy.” Most importantly, for our considerations,

these texts cemented the idea that the national bourgeoisie was essentially ambiguous in its

attitude toward the revolutionary movement.

In Mao’s description, the national bourgeoisie had a “dual character” (两面性 liangmi-

anxing). The national bourgeoisie had a progressive aspect—or “at certain periods and to

a certain degree […] a certain revolutionary nature” that made it an ally in the struggle

against imperialism and oppressive government—but another that turned away from the

future—it was an exploitative class opposed to socialism and that had “a proneness to com-

promise with the enemies of the revolution.”34 Over the years, the index of the speciﬁc

actions that constituted progressive versus reactionary conduct changed dramatically, but

the description of the national capitalist as a Janus-like ﬁgure remained the principle for the

Communist Party’s policy.

As for the United Front, it evolved from a theory of revolutionary struggle into a mode of

action during theCivilWar. Itbecamethe nameforthe techniquesused bythepartytowork

34 Mao, “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party”; Mao, “On New Democracy.”

11 with groups located on the fringes of the collective that the Communist Party considered as its own: intellectuals, ethnic and religious groups, the diaspora, and, most important of all, the national bourgeoisie. By deﬁnition, as Emmanuel Jourda points out, the United

Front was in the business of classiﬁcation: its “sectors of intervention” were the groups it designated as marginal.35 Against expectations, the Communist Party not only maintained its ambivalent relationship with the national bourgeoise but refashioned the United Front to become an institution by which to govern liminal populations.

At this point, it is time to turn to the formation of a capitalist type beyond its strictly discursive aspects. For the capitalists gained visibility not only through description and depiction but also through organizations drawing together persons whose social position corresponded to the image of the capitalist.36 Chambers of commerce began popping up in the Lower Yangzi region in the ﬁrst decade of the twentieth century and quickly grew in importance.37 This “broad diffusion of a particular modern form” reﬂected the fact that members recognized that they shared a social position in the new economic environment of the treaty ports, a realization that is not diminished by members of the group continuing to refer to themselves as merchants.38 In the following years, the distinction between “capitalist” and “merchant” became increasingly blurred. By the time the Communists took power, the term “industrialists and merchants” (工商业者 gongshangyezhe) was used as a neutral alternative to denote the same category of people as the ideologically loaded “capitalists.”

Through their involvement in chambers of commerce, as well as religious groups and relief associations, those who were recognized as members of the bourgeoisie gained the means to inﬂuence the image of this class. The concept of the national bourgeoisie was thus more than just a label invented and imposed upon society by the Communist Party. It was a representation that resonated with members of an emerging class that legitimated its own enrichment by arguing that it would bring prosperity and progress to the Chinese nation

35 Jourda, “Les usages postrévolutionnaires,” 11. 36 Cf. Boltanski, The Making of a Class, 31–35. 37 Chen, Modern China’s Network Revolution; Bergère, L’âge d’or. 38 Strand, “A High Place Is No Better Than a Low Place,” 119.

12 and who put words into action by leading patriotic boycotts and relief efforts.39

On this basis, the Communist Party developed a strategy of rapprochement and co-

option during the civil war. In the tense months between the surrender of Japan and the

resumption of armed battles between the Communists and the Guomindang, the China

National Democratic Construction Association (中国民主建国会 Zhongguo minzhu jianguo-

hui)—hereafter referred to by its common short form Minjian—held its ﬁrst meeting in the wartime capital of Chongqing. According to its own manifesto, the Minjian was an asso-

ciation of “producers and educators” whose social standing and ﬁnancial ease meant they would not have “to resort to political power to pursue [their] own ambitions.”40 That is,

membership was deﬁned as belonging to both the educated and economic elite.

For the Communist Party, whose agents actively supported the creation of the Minjian,

the association became tantamount to the political mouthpiece of the bourgeoisie. It was in

this capacity that the Minjian became an institution after 1949. Together with the Federation

of Industry and Commerce (工商业联合会 Gongshangye lianhehui)—hereafter FIC—, an organ

set up through the consolidation of chambers of commerce and professional associations,

the Minjian formed the Two Associations (两会 liang hui). Subjugated to the United Front

departments, the Two Associations served to represent, monitor, and direct the bourgeoisie

on behalf of the party.

To resume, the capitalists’ emergence as a type relevant to the description of Chinese

society had nothing to do with the state’s capacity to impose its visions and divisions on so-

ciety. Instead, the capitalist type took shape gradually over the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth

century, through linguistic transfer, political discourse, and the forms of social organization

that accompanied industrial modernity. In order not to obscure the constitutive role of so-

cial practice and discourse, it must be made clear precisely what was created through the

state formalization of class identity. From the short review of social and linguistic change in

the early twentieth century, we see that the capitalist as a type was decidedly not a product

39 Yeh, Shanghai Splendor; Gerth, China Made; Xiao-Planes, “La Shanghai Civic Association.” 40 Quoted in Curran, “From Educator to Politician,” 99–100.

13 of state ascription that was later reiﬁed through cultural representation and emerging forms of political and social organization—it was the other way around. The same, however, does not apply to the capitalist as population.

The distinction between the two is important for two reasons. First, it reminds us not to overstate the constitutive power of ofﬁcial language at the expense of the social practices that went into capitalist group formation. Second, the gradual emergence of the capitalist group highlights New China’s debt to Old Society, a theme that will be further developed below. Having established this distinction, it is time to move from the capitalist type to the capitalist population and spell out the way in which the latter was, indeed, a creation of socialism.

The difference socialism made

MenlikeWuZhongyiandRongYirenﬁtnicelywiththementalimageofthecapitalist. Their clothing, possessions, experiences, and manners approached the capitalist ideal, which is why they struck their First World guests as a familiar presence in an unfamiliar environment. For some, it was like coming home: a visitor to the three-storey home of Shell’s director in China likened it to “an oasis of comfort and elegance in the midst of the city’s drabness.”41 This was not a view endorsed by the Communist Party. Nevertheless, the same prototypical quality—the sense that they were somehow more capitalist than other capitalists—made the wealthy elite useful to the party.

Under the United Front policy, the party selected those who had established themselves as captains of industry and commerce before the founding of the People’s Republic to play the role of loyal capitalists after. Their social standing and inﬂuence allowed them to per- form a bridging function as mediators of party control over the bourgeoisie.42 This function was reinforced when these men were elected for top positions in the Two Associations: Wu sat on the executive committee of the Shanghai FIC between 1956 and 1980 while Rong held

41 Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai, 3. 42 U, “Dangerous Privilege.”

14 key positions in both government and the FIC from the 1950s until the end of his life. In

addition, both were high-standing members of the Minjian and delegates in the CPPCC.

As formal and ideal representatives of the bourgeoisie, they gave a voice to their class

that was ampliﬁed by public media and internal party reports. After their deaths, they have

continued to serve as examples of what it meant to be a capitalist in the People’s Republic as

their lives have been recorded in ofﬁcial biographies and histories. But when the capitalists

are considered as a distinct population, it is clear that the men who became its cultural,

institutional, and historical representatives belonged to a tiny elite.43

In a statistical sense, Wu and Rong were anything but representative. Their lives were

far removed from the absolute majority of those who were formally counted among the

capitalists after the transition to socialism. Wu had investments that the state valued at well over one million yuan at the time of socialist transformation in the mid-1950s.44 This

easily put Richman’s host in an exclusive club of industrialists whose combined assets ex-

ceeded the million yuan mark. This club had only eighty-nine members across the country,

three-fourths of whom lived in Shanghai (Table 0.1). If Wu’s wealth was impressive, it was

nevertheless dwarfed by that of Rong, whose investments in Shanghai were valued at nine

million yuan in 1956.45

Yet China’s capitalist population went far beyond the club of eighty-nine. In Shanghai

alone, the state assimilation of private companies affected well over 200,000 proprietors and

shareholders.46 Four-ﬁfths in this group had investments that the state valued at two thou-

sand yuan or less in 1956, with the average investor having just above four hundred yuan to

their name. While this holds true even for the comparatively capital-rich industrial sector,

43 Christopher Leighton makes a good point when he warns against treating the capitalists as a unitary group and clearly states that his own work focuses on a tiny elite. An argument can be made for counting less fortunate capitalists among what he calls “the ultimate subalterns of PRC history,” but this label clearly does not apply to members of the bourgeois elite, whose voice is strong in the ofﬁcial record, or even the moderately wealthy and educated, in Leighton, “Capitalists, Cadres, and Culture,” 4–5. 44 Richman was told that Wu received dividends corresponding to 1.6 million yuan in assets, Richman, Industrial Society in Communist China, 908. A 1956 document from the Shanghai FIC gives a ﬁgure of nearly 1.2 million for Wu’s share in the Shenxin Textile Corporation, SHMA: C48-1-170. 45 SHMA: C48-1-170 46 Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei tongzhanbu, Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiushi, and Shanghai shi dang’anguan, ZZGSYSG (Shanghai), II:Table10a–c.

15 Table 0.1: Number of investors in Shanghai and Tianjin grouped according to 1956 value of investment

Jurisdiction Total RMB1,000,000 oftotal

Shanghai* 171,278 132,942 0.78 38,268 0.22 68 0

Tianjin 51,579 40,723 0.79 10,854 0.21 2 0

Nationwide* 533,690 436,087 0.82 97,514 0.18 89 0 *Industrial sector only. Values below than one hundredth appear as null due to rounding. Source: Zhonggong zhongyang dangshi ziliao zhengji weiyuanhui et al, 1386; Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei tongzhanbu et al, Table 10a; Zhonggong Tianjin shiwei tongzhanbu et al, Table 9. the gap becomes even more obvious when adding the owners of restaurants, hotels, and hair salons who, nine times out of ten, had assets that the state valued below two thousand yuan (Table 0.2).

Table 0.2: Number of investors per sector grouped according to 1956 value of investment, Shanghai only

Sector Total RMB50,000 oftotal

Industry 171,278 132,942 0.78 35,615 0.21 2,721 0.02

Commerce 34,620 24,342 0.70 9,932 0.29 346 0.01

Food and beverage 5,168 4,879 0.94 288 0.06 1 0

Service 5,672 4,894 0.86 759 0.13 19 0 Values smaller than one-hundredth appear as null due to rounding. Source: Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei tongzhanbu et al, Table 10b

Socialist transformation did not reduce the gap between the wealthy elite and the average entrepreneur. Instead, the price set on a person’s assets at the moment of state procurement became the basis for a ﬁxed-rate dividend (定息 dingxi). These dividends were issued in quarterly installments for a period of ten years, before the Red Guard movement prompted the government to put a stop to the payouts. Set at ﬁve percent of the value of his original assets, Wu Zhongyi’s dividends amounted to 80,000 yuan per year.47 By contrast, the yearly payout to an average capitalist from Shanghai was no more than twenty yuan.

To put these numbers in perspective, a Shanghai worker in the 1960s would have had to

47 Richman, Industrial Society in Communist China, 908.

16 work almost one hundred years to earn what Wu was paid in yearly dividends, whereas

they made more in two weeks than an average capitalist received in their yearly payments

(see Appendix A). If Wu’s dividends sufﬁced for him to keep servants and luxury cars,

many so-called capitalists received payouts that, to quote a 1969 report signed off by Mao,

afforded them no more than “a few packs of cigarettes” (see Chapter 5). Even so, a number

of capitalist families depended directly on dividend payouts to offset meager incomes and

others did so indirectly as the social security system for the capitalist population was linked

to dividends.

A comparison between the bourgeois one-percenters and the average capitalist is only

possible on the condition that the ﬁgures of investors (the label used in the tabulations above)

are assumed to correspond to the number of capitalists. A reasonable objection would be

that such a leap amounts to an unjustiﬁable conﬂation of two categories and that the lack of

a clear referent makes the very concept of a capitalist population inoperable. At ﬁrst glance,

this study seems to support such an objection. There was indeed a theoretical distinction

between investors and capitalists. Not only did this distinction become a point of contention

and negotiation on the individual level, it eventually became the object of national policy.

And yet the distinction became contentious precisely because of a prevalent conﬂation

of the two categories in administrative practice and political communication. The follow-

ing chapters will substantiate this claim (see especially Chapters 3 and 5). Here, a single

example is enough. When Richman asked for the number of capitalists in China, his hosts

answered by giving the number of dividend recipients across the country (almost a third liv-

ing in Shanghai) and that these consisted mainly of “small businessmen or shopkeepers.”48

There will be reason to get back to the number he was provided—300,000 nationwide— which was different from the 533,690 investors counted at the moment of socialist transition

(Table 0.1) and even further from the 860,000 classiﬁed as capitalists according to a report in

1981 which added that the majority of this population should, in fact, not have qualiﬁed as

capitalists at all (see Chapter 5). What follows is, in part, an explanation for why the Shang-

48 Richman, 894.

17 hai ofﬁcials chose to answer Richman’s question the way they did and why this answer differed so from the conclusion reached in 1981.

As will become clear later on, the question about the size of the capitalist population was answered with the number of dividend recipient because capitalist status had become synonymous, in practice if not in theory, with being the object of a particular form of expropriation. This brings us to the question of how “capitalist” became the name of an administrative-legal type. The capitalists constituted a “category of state” in that they shared a common position in the hierarchical order of class status, which determined career opportunities, salaries, social security and more.49 Through the ascription of class status, an equivalence was drawn between a Jaguar-owner and a recipient of cigarette-money. It is this equivalence that makes it meaningful to count both among the capitalist population.

From Marxist abstraction to actually existing class

Early studies of the Chinese class status system ﬁxated on the gap between a rigid taxonomy of class and socio-economic relationships fundamentally changed by the transition to socialism. The topic began receiving scholarly attention upon reports that class background had become a point of violent contention in the Cultural Revolution. In order to explain the Red

Guard movement, social scientists set out to prove that formal class identity could predict the outcome of a choice between “radical” and “conservative” factions.50

Inspired by these studies of mobilization, Richard Kraus took the movement as an opportunity to read society backwards, on the assumption that the conﬂicts it had brought to the fore could reveal the systemic dysfunctions of Chinese socialism.51 In the Cultural

49 Tani Barlow notes how the Chinese intellectual, as a political subject, came to refer to the position allocated to it as a “category of state,” not least to lay claim to privilege and inﬂuence after Mao’s death, in Barlow, “Zhishifenzi [Chinese Intellectuals] and Power.” Although the genealogies of the Chinese intellectual, also known as the bourgeois intelligentsia, and the Chinese bourgeoisie did not always run parallel, this observation is directly relevant to the history presented here. 50 For example, Lee, “The Radical Students in Kwangtung During the Cultural Revolution”; Chan, Rosen, and Unger, “Students and Class Warfare”; this view has since been challenged, most notably in a recent study by Andrew Walder, in which the author argues that social background was less important than political process and how the changing environment of the movement constrained actors’ choices, Walder, Fractured Rebellion. 51 In this he was not alone, the Cultural Revolution constituted a fundamental challenge to scholarship on the

18 Revolution, Kraus saw a reaction to the state’s failure to adapt ofﬁcial classiﬁcation so as to

account for the generation of new inequalities in bureaucratized society.52 In a response,

Jean-François Billeter challenged this interpretation.53 Although he agreed that there was a

discrepancy, he objected that this was no ﬂaw but the very element that made the system

effective.

In Billeter’s view, the ideology of class—speciﬁcally Mao’s theory that class struggle

remained under socialism—masked the true purpose of a sui generis system.54 Hidden un-

der the ideological veil was a system whose fundamental rationale was the creation and

legitimization of a new social hierarchy based on the rational redistribution of resources.

Despite signiﬁcant differences in their arguments, both authors agreed that the class status

system had done violence to society by forcing it into rigid categories. On this point, Bil-

leter’s argument was the more ambitious. He posited that the class status system revealed

a fundamental afﬁnity between state regulation and market regulation as deployed in cap-

italist and socialist societies respectively. This led him to charge the Chinese Communists with reproducing the errors of the nineteenth-century English liberals who had torn down

customary hierarchies, rights, obligations, and beliefs so as to replace them with the imper-

sonal socio-economic regulation of the market and an abstract ideology.55

By arguing that the socialist bureaucracy, with the help of the class status system, took

on a function analogous to the market, Billeter produces one of the most forceful articula-

tions within the China ﬁeld of what has been labelled “authoritarian high modernism” elsewhere.56 His intervention has clear connections to a postwar critique that ﬁnds a supreme

conﬁdence in rational design, standardization, and homogenization to be the cause of some

of modernity’s most tragic failures.57 The weight that Kraus and Billeter attached to the

People’s Republic of China both in terms of conceptualization and through the dissemination of new types of sources, see Esherick, Pickowicz, and Walder, Cultural Revolution as History. 52 Kraus, Class Conﬂict in Chinese Socialism. 53 Billeter, “The System of Class Status.” 54 Billeter, 137. 55 Here, Billeter refers to the description of the rise of “market society” in Polanyi, The Great Transformation. 56 Of course, Billeter’s article predates the hugely inﬂuential criticism of state-led modernization, and Soviet collectivization especially, that coined this term, namely Scott, Seeing Like a State, 193–222. 57 More than any other discipline, anthropology has shaped this critique of the modern state. In addition to Karl

19 class status system had support not just from the scientiﬁc literature that inspired them but also from the published sources on which they based their analysis.

In outward communication, the Chinese Communists often gave emphasis to socialism’s scientific roots. Indeed, socialism’s kinship with modern social theory was part of what made the ideology so successful among a generation of progressively minded intellectuals and politicians in China who had high hopes for the social sciences as a basis for governing the country.58 In the year after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the party reaffirmed this commitment through the publication of a series of lectures on the fundaments of the social sciences in the CCP Central Propaganda Department’s bi-weekly journal Study. One of these lectures contained an exposition of Lenin’s principle of class division. It opened with a passage demonstrating a high degree of self-reflexivity:

Class is the separation [划分 huafen] according to a certain principle of society’s

numerous persons into large groups. Why say “according to a certain princi-

ple”? We could use all kinds of different criteria to separate the people in society

into large groups. For example, the entire society of humanity can be separated

into nationalities. And within each nationality, further separation is possible

of men from women on the basis of sex; separation of children, youths, adults,

and the old on the basis of age; separation of atheists, Protestants, Catholics, and

Muslims…; it is also possible to separate into materialists and idealists on the

basis of worldview… But large groups separated in this way are not classes. If

we are to become clear on what class is, [we] need a precise understanding of

the principle that is the basis of class separation.59

The writers of this lecture acknowledged that the world could be represented in a mul- titude of ways, all conceivable and valid on their own terms. The only thing that made

Polanyi and Pierre Bourdieu—the ethnographer-turned-sociologist—both cited by in Billeter’s article, one can mention Pierre Clastres (in La Société contre l’État, 1974), Owen Lattimore (in his description of the Chinese state’s miserable failure to deal with the realities of pastoral life), and ﬁnally James Scott who makes so many appearances in the footnotes of books and articles on the People’s Republic of China so as to merit particular attention below. 58 Lam, A Passion for Facts, 153. 59 Hu, Yu, and Wang, “Shehui kexue jiben zhishi jiangzuo”; see also Jun, “Huafen jieji de yuanze he biaozhun.”

20 Lenin’s principle of class division superior to other divisions was that it rendered transparent rules of society that were obscured by the other taxonomies. In a word, it was scientiﬁc.

Like other sciences, it constructs “reality in all its wealth of forms, internal relations and dependencies as the result of a combination of the most simple abstractions.”60 The theoretical basis for class ascription was, in this sense, distinct from the divine imaginaries and hereditary principles that traditional systems of social differentiation were built upon. But it was not quite like some of its modern counterparts either, like the differentiation of sex and race on the basis of biological science. All these systems, traditional and modern, have in common that they reference some external order, whether divine, hereditary, or biological. By contrast, class analysis was rooted in social science and the radical idea that society could and should be explained by way of society.

By itself, the scientiﬁc representation of class analysis that one ﬁnds in Study supports the thesis that the designers of the class status system were among the most devout followers of high modernism. In Eddy U’s recent work, we encounter the opinion that the Chinese socialist state not only subscribed to an elaborate theory of class but invested a large amount of “material and symbolic resources to clarify or ascertain the class status of the individual on an everyday basis.”61 Such a sizeable investment would have been motivated, in his view, by the class status system’s reinforcement and legitimation of the political order.

Going one step further, he suggests that the class status system was made possible only through the new regime’s unparalleled capacity to carry out bureaucratic classiﬁcation. It owed this newfound strength to a convergence of single-party rule, central planning, and

“a universal schema of classes derived from Marxist ideology.”62

By opposition to most studies of the class status system, the present study ﬁnds little support for the high modernist thesis. The Study lecture is interesting because it represents a vision by members of the party intelligentsia of the class status system as it could have been, but this group ﬁnally had little say in the implementation of class assignment. Once

60 Pashukanis, Law and Marxism, 65. 61 U, “Rise of Marxist Classes,” 3. 62 U, 5.

21 attention shifts from reflections on the principles of class analysis to the administrative work of classification it becomes clear that there was a disconnection between theory and practice. The coevolution of science and government, one of the defining features of state-led modernity, was almost entirely absent here. The minimum of central planning and govern- mental guidelines hardly merits being termed “a universal schema of classes.” This study argues that scholars have generally overestimated the univocality and rigidity of the class status system.

As for the question of how existing guidelines were actually implemented in practice, the empirical basis is still relatively weak but new studies do suggest that class assignment constituted a “system” only in the loosest sense of the word.63 In an important study of the interplay between central policy and its realization in a county just south of the Yellow

River, Jeremy Brown concludes that class assignment was characterized by “dynamism, instability, extreme variation, and sheer confusion.”64

It should be further speciﬁed that this dynamism was not, or at least was not primarily, the outcome of a gap between the intentions of policy-makers and the complications that inevitably arise in local implementation. It is true that the complex relations of ownership in the Chinese countryside, where many types of communal and individual ownership coexisted and several households might have different kinds of claims to the same piece of land, would have proven to be a source of frustration even for a state willing to plough endless resources into the construction of a versatile and precise classiﬁcatory schema.65

Yet those who drafted what little standards there were did not show any signs of accepting the daunting costs of classiﬁcation, opting instead, at most every turn, for expediency over precision. As he took a ﬁnal look at the draft of the single most important document on class assignment, the 1950 Decision on the Division of Rural Class Status, Liu Shaoqi

63 If the practical implementation of classiﬁcation in the villages is an understudied topic, this goes double for the cities, cf. Wemheuer, A Social History of Maoist China, 63. 64 Brown, “Moving Targets,” 53. 65 On the complexity of land tenancy in late imperial China—especially the practice of tenants sub-renting “top- soil” rights while the landowner retained “bottom soil” rights—and its effects on land reform, see Cao and Liu, Chuantong Zhongguo diquan.

22 lowered from ﬁve to three years the period required for a woman from a working class household who married a landlord, rich peasant, or capitalist to absorb her husband’s class status. In a rare glimpse into the reasoning behind such decisions, he commented that the lower standard was consistent with other, non-marriage related, temporal criteria and thus

“a bit more reasonable.”66 On rare occasion, the leadership did address what it described as

ﬂaws of local class assignment, notably during the transition toward a less radical mode of land reform in 1948, and even offered further precision on particularly contentious issues

(such as the distinction between middle peasants and rich peasants).67 For the most part, however, the response to procedural inadequacies was a restatement of the principles of land reform rather than new and improved standards.

The only formal basis for class assignment was a rudimentary taxonomy that had evolved from early experiments in the Jiangxi Soviet in the 1930s (see Appendix B). It developed through a process characterized by a bare minimum of standardization and theoretical debate. In this, the Chinese taxonomy of class was no different from its Soviet forerunner, which was similarly devoid of “hard-and-fast criteria” and “rules about how to resolve ambiguous cases.”68 In the summer of 1950, the government codiﬁed the procedures by promulgating ﬁrst the Land Reform Law and soon thereafter the Decision on the Division of Rural Class Status. The second document produced a typology of classes in the countryside by compounding two decisions from the early days of land reform and adding a new, supplementary decision from the Government Administration

Council. This document was to serve as a guideline for local ofﬁcials and party activists in the organization of struggle sessions and land redistribution, which explains its focus on participation in labor and land ownership as measures of exploitation.

Some aspects of land reform, especially the idea that large landholders and high rents

66 See the notes to Zhou Enlai’s reply to Liu Shaoqi on August 14, 1950, Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi and Zhongyang dang’anguan, Jianguo yilai Zhou Enlai wengao, 160. 67 See Ren Bishi’s speech on land reform Ren, “Genju shenme biaozhun lai huafen nongcun jieji.” followed three days later by Zhonggong zhongyang Huadong ju and Dongbei xingzheng weiyuanhui, “Guanyu zai Dongbei nongcun zhong huafen jieji.”. On the distinction between middle peasants and rich peasants, see Zhongyang, “Guanyu zhongnong yu funong huafen wenti dui zhongnanju de fushi.”. 68 Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class,” 753.

23 constituted an impediment to the country’s development, were clearly indicative of the type of state project that James Scott and other critics of high modernism view with such suspicion. But in these respects, agrarian reform was a global trend, having been embraced by the new nation states that emerged from the break-up of European empires in the wake of both the ﬁrst and second world war as well as by the Guomindang government on Tai- wan.69 What set Chinese Communist Party’s brand of land reform apart was the assignment of class status, a technique that had less to do with the redistribution of land than with the reorganization of village life so as to exclude those designated as landlords. With its heavy reliance on casual classiﬁcation and the participation of the local community in ritualized class struggle, it was less a dictatorship of rigid categories than it was a “tyranny of structurelessness.”70

If rural classification procedures were poorly standardized to begin with, the urban assignment of class status had even less to go on. Jeremy Brown, like most scholars who have written about class assignment, focuses on the countryside because the rules for class assignment were designed for land reform.71 Land reform, however, had no legitimate place in the cities.72 The Land Reform Law explicitly stated the obligation to “protect industry and commerce” from any “encroachment” in the process of land redistribution. In view of the origins of class assignment in land reform, the appearance of urban class status can best be described as a revolutionary byproduct. The index of urban class identities by far exceeded the official typology of class, becoming what Billeter calls an “indefinitely extend- able nomenclature of socio-professional categories.”73

Only some urban class designations, like the capitalist status, were politically and legally

69 Wemheuer, A Social History of Maoist China, 55–56. 70 Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” 71 This holds true for early scholarship, such as Unger, “The Class System in Rural China.”; Huang, “Rural Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution.” as well as for more recent case studies like Zhang, “Land Reform in Yang Village.”; Zhang, “Class Categories and Marriage Patterns in Rural China in the Mao Era.” and the treatment of class assignment in broader historical surveys such as Yang, Jianguo shi yanjiu, pp. 137–45. Eddy U’s work on urban intellectuals is the most notable exception to this trend. 72 It did, however, take place in the rural counties that surrounded cities like Shanghai and were part of the same administrative unit. For this purpose, the Government Administration Council passed the Regulations for Land Reform in Suburban Districts (城市郊区土地改革条例 Chengshi jiaoqu tudi gaige tiaoli) on November 10, 1950; this meant that class assignment took place in the outskirts of Shanghai as well, cf. SHMA: A71-1-581. 73 Billeter, “The System of Class Status,” 129.

24 meaningful, but even then, this study shows, there were no stipulated criteria for assignment. Without standards, the central government had no way to tell if the label used in the report from District X referred to the same population as in the one used in the table from

Town Y.

This study finds capitalist status to be the indirect outcome of a policy of dispossession rather than the direct result of formal classification. In the rush to complete socialist transformation in 1956, with major cities completing the campaign for public-private joint management in just a few months, there was little time to distinguish between types of owners and shareholders. Without any formal decision on the matter, hundreds of thousands filled out “capitalist” on resume forms or where labelled as such in company lists of employees. At the same time, this identity was elevated to become an administrative-legal type through the introduction of regulations on salaries, dividend payments, and welfare that specifically targeted capitalists. These policies were designed to be temporary measures. The prevalent sentiment, expressed in comments from capitalists and party leaders alike, was that the capitalists would soon have reformed themselves and that the class status system as a whole was quickly losing its relevance. Contrary to these expectations, the class status system remained in place and the political relevance of old class identities did not diminish. What reason could there have been to maintain a classification system inef- fectual for central planning or the rational redistribution of resources? The answer is found in the differentiation of socialism from the society out of which it emerged.

Toward a history of differentiation

Class status became important not as a form of regulation but to make plain the way that socialism was distinct from a type of modernity that revolution had rendered illegitimate.

To be sure, making China into a modern nation remained a key political goal after the socialist transition. One ﬁnds here several features commonly cited in deﬁnitions of modernity: mass society, agrarian revolution, industrialization, rational bureaucracy, social interven-

25 tionism, and so on. There are several terms that could be used to describe the speciﬁcities of this particular form—such as “Maoist” modernity74 or “high socialism”75—but the aim of this study is neither to defend any such label or to come up with a new one. What is important here, rather, is that modernity comes in many different forms. Or, more to the point, the circulation of ideas and technologies that made up the worldwide movement of modernity has a history of its own.

Returning to the subject at hand, this means that the system of class status does not let itself be explained by references to state ideology or technologies alone but requires particular attention as to their evolution in China at a particular moment in time, namely in the global context of the postwar era and the national context of revolutionary transformation.

Both the violent throes of class politics and the institution of class status were indeed modern but they appeared in the global context of the postwar era and the national context of a movement out of the revolution. As a modernizing project, Chinese socialism was as much a response to the past as it was about realizing a vision of the future.

The Second World War was a turning point in the global history of socialism. The most obvious change was the geographic expansion of state socialism through, on the one hand, the establishment of communist regimes in eastern European countries occupied by the

Soviet Union at the end of the war and, on the other, a series of successful revolutions in former colonies and other countries in the peripheries of crumbling European empires. It is only recently, however, that historians have begun investigating the war’s impact on the

Soviet Union itself and treat postwar Stalinism as a period in its own right.76 In China, the end of the revolution coincided with the end of a civil war that was a direct continuation of the war with Japan.77

The founding of the People’s Republic followed but did not end a “continuum of crisis” that had started with the collapse of a fragile republic soon after the Revolution of 1911 and

74 Meyskens, Mao’s Third Front, 20. 75 Brown and Johnson, Maoism at the Grassroots, 6. 76 Fürst, Late Stalinist Russia; Cadiot and Penter, “Law and Justice in Wartime and Postwar Stalinism.” 77 Thus the year 1945 was not China’s “zero hour” and the war against Japan was impossible to separate from the ensuing civil war, Van de Ven, China at War, 38.

26 culminated in total mobilization and mass death during World War II and the immediately

ensuing Civil War.78 This period of unrest became, in its latter stages, a highly internation-

alized conﬂict and the suspension of the Civil War saw the partition of Chinese national

territory along the lines of the Cold War, with both the Guomindang government on Tai- wan and the Communist government on the mainland maintaining the ﬁction that they

ruled the country as a whole.79

Somewhat counterintuitively, the postwar period was also a time of convergence. It was a time that saw increased bureaucratic coordination of economic activity and the ex-

pansion of the welfare state in both market and command economies.80 Although the Cold

War divided the Chinese territory along the Taiwan Strait, it did not set the two govern-

ments on opposite paths. For example, the constant threat of attack worked as a strong

incentive on both sides of the strait to prioritize strategic producer industries over the development of light industry and production of consumer goods.81 Globally, the victors’

consensus after the war was that the conditions that had led to the devastating war had to

be eliminated. The governments that emerged from the war justiﬁed their rule, in East as in

West, by promising to build more just and equitable societies, and a peaceful world order.

The postwar moment and the postrevolutionary condition share one fundamental fea-

ture, namely the way that they collapse the walls separating past from present. Henry

Rousso, the historian of Vichy France, relates his refusal to function as an expert witness

in the trial of Maurice Papon, accused and then convicted for sending Jews to extermina-

tion camps, to his professional conviction that the past should be put “at a distance” and

that the political sacralization of memory “abolishes distance” and “ignores hierarchies of

78 Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution. 79 For an account of the Civil War attentive to its international dimension, see Westad, Decisive Encounters; on the partition of China and the Guomindang’s postrevolutionary regime on Taiwan, see Mengin, Fragments of an Unfinished War. 80 Jake Werner argues for a conceptualization of Chinese socialism that stresses its affinities with postwar Fordism in advanced capitalist economies, in “Global Fordism in 1950s Urban China”; Nara Dillon situates the origins and postwar expansion of the Chinese welfare state in its global context, Radical Inequalities. 81 Of course, industrial development on Taiwan was distinct from the one in Mainland China, but there were significant commonalities in economic strategy in the period up to 1956, see Bramall, Chinese Economic Development, 87–89; Kirby, “Continuity and Change,” 133–36; Mengin, Fragments of an Unfinished War, 38–39.

27 time.”82 One need not agree with Rousso’s stance to consider his remarks on the lack of distance well suited to describe the prevalent attitude toward the past in China after 1949.

Here, terms like “old” and “new” were as likely to describe customs, thoughts, institutions, and even people that coexisted side-by-side as they were a linear progression from past to present. The exploiters of class society lived next to the ones they had exploited and the majority of those who had collaborated with the Japanese or sided with the Guomindang never left. Class status, in this context, served to make the prerevolutionary past visible in the postrevolutionary present.

Revolution, here, is the extension by political means of a movement of social criticism— what Antonio Gramsci once described as a process of differentiation. In his writings, the

Sardinian prisoner underlines how the revolutionary exploits the contradictions present within dominant ideology to set in motion a “process of differentiation and change in the relative weight that the elements of old ideologies used to possess. What was previously secondary and subordinate, or even incidental, is now taken to be primary—becomes the nucleus of a new ideological and theoretical complex.”83 Gramsci’s revolutionary is not a prophet but a critic.84 This conceptualization of revolution as a process of differentiation offers an alternative, when we turn to the history of the People’s Republic of China, to the insistence on continuity that characterizes the modernist paradigm, on the one hand, and the constructivist exaggeration of the constitutive power of semiotics, on the other. Further- more, it resolves the apparent paradox of “accelerated change” coexisting with “enduring legacies of the old order” in the making of the postwar and postrevolutionary order.85 If the process of differentiation might seem overly abstract, it can be observed empirically in the social practices of dissociation: the various ways in which people and institutions work upon society so as to distinguish it from an illegitimate past.

The practices of dissociation run like a red thread through Chinese socialism. Giving

82 Quoted in Lorenz and Bevernage, “Breaking up Time,” 42. 83 Cited in Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 68. 84 This reading, which compares Gramsci’s version of social criticism favorably to the messianic kind, draws on Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism, 41–43. 85 Howlett, “Accelerated Transition.”

28 prominence to the weight of the past, Ann Anagnost has argued that the performative nar-

ratives of land reform conveyed old society as “as the negation of everything the new soci-

ety promised to deliver.”86 Through collective rituals in which peasants were encouraged

to voice old grievances in the language of class and revolution emerged something like a

shared narrative on past injustice—by excluding landlords from the events the unsettling

testimonies of designated perpetrators were avoided—and the negative representation of

the past became a mainstay of ofﬁcial culture in the 1950s and even more so in the 1960s when it was time to educate the ﬁrst postrevolutionary generation in the 1960s. Here, the

study of policy and practice suggests a more complicated relationship with the past than

narrative and propaganda might suggest. Only at certain points in time—land reform be-

ing one, the Great Leap Forward another—did a clean break with the past appear as an

attainable goal. For most of the period studied here, the lingering past was a reality that

both bureaucrats and party leaders had no choice but to live with. The relevance of the

past extended to the policing of threats from class enemies but also the work to exploit and

reform the populations protected under the United Front; to the difference in expectations

between poor peasants and capitalists who continued to be identiﬁed using prerevolution-

ary categories; and to the screening of government employees and purges of reactionaries within the party.

The principle of puriﬁcation was central to the politics of dissociation not only in postrev-

olutionary China but the wider postwar world. If the Chinese 清理 qingli was of a different

species than the French épuration and the German Säuberung, they belonged at least to the

same genus. The comparison goes beyond language: the Chinese Communist Party found

itself constrained by the same limitations as other postwar regimes in the implementation

of programs to contain and punish those it held accountable for the unjust order of the

past. The party kept many of the customs and conventions of the ancien régime and found it

necessary to retain personnel to assure the continued functioning of the state organization.

Moreover, under the United Front, it actively sought to employ leaders of ethnic minorities

86 Anagnost, National Past-Times, 33.

29 and religious groups as well as so-called bourgeois intellectuals and capitalists, who were valued not just for the knowledge and skills they possessed but because they could bridge the gap between the party and groups at the margins of the political community. The question of how to make use of the old elite, while simultaneously containing its inﬂuence, was one side of the capitalist problem.

The superimposition of postwar and postrevolutionary frames helps explain the significance and endurance of capitalist status in the absence of central regulation. In the So- viet Union, class identities lost most of their immediate political relevance when military buildup in Europe prompted a shift from domestic class conﬂict to the struggle against external enemies—Germans, Japanese, White émigrés, and Leon Trotsky—and the elimination of collaborators and spies. In China, by contrast, international developments and domestic events did not cause the prerevolutionary past to fade but instead rendered into a formidable political force that was not extinguished until after Mao’s death. The intention is not to level differences in how states dealt with the wartime past, but to improve our understanding of the speciﬁcity and historicity of Chinese socialism in the postwar world.

The Shanghai of the archives

This study has a local focus: the city of Shanghai. A hub of regional trade before the Opium

War and a node in the global shipping network after, it had grown into China’s foremost industrial and commercial center with a population of over ﬁve million in the period under consideration. It should be clear that to investigate political practice in China’s largest city is not the same as studying developments at the grassroots. If this is a study of practice, it takes place on a level of analysis where texts do most of the heavy lifting. Political practice, understood in this way, is what happens in the interplay between the policy documents that convey the priorities and concerns of the central leadership and their translation into concrete measures for local implementation.87 In this sense, what follows is not a study of a

87 Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution, 7.

30 local case but an examination of two interrelated problems. The one concerned the socialist

evolution of Shanghai, the other the future of the capitalist population. Although rooted in

a local context, these were matters with a political signiﬁcance for the entire country.

An investigation along these lines naturally takes the state archives as its main site of

ﬁeldwork. Gail Hershatter aptly describes the archives as “a record of the state talking

to itself.” She ﬁnds state archives to be lacking because they cannot tell us “everything we want to know.”88 Undeniably, the archives are poorly equipped to answer questions

such as how political changes resonated among local residents, how residents understood

their own role in the transformation, or how they experienced the moment of change. Such

stories have been key in Hershatter’s important work to subvert the canonical history of

the People’s Republic. My own work is not intended as a criticism of those who want to

uncover voices and experiences from beyond the political realm or beneath the structures

of state, but neither is it commensurable with their approach. By adding distinct readings

of singular narratives together we do not get a total history, but an entangled mess. History,

sadly, is not an accumulative endeavor.

The following account takes us not out to the margins or down to the grassroots, but

turns inward for a visceral examination of the political organization. My interest is in one

Shanghai only: the version that appears through intrabureaucratic communication, the ver-

sion one ﬁnds today, in fragmented form, in the archives. This methodological approach

requires no reading between the lines or juxtaposition of narratives as the goal is to deepen

our understanding of ofﬁcial scripts rather than to subvert them. Ann Laura Stoler’s warn-

ing to her colleagues working in colonial archives—that they should not assume that the

ofﬁcial story is so familiar that the only viable reading is a subversive one—applies to an

even greater extent to the study of the People’s Republic of China where the political and

bureaucratic history has largely been written without access to state archives.89

There are plenty of challenges when working with Chinese archives—ethical and prag-

88 Hershatter, “Notes from the Alleyway,” 110. 89 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 50.

31 matical, methodological and epistemological, some familiar to historians working in other parts of the world and others less so.90 My own source base was primarily constructed over the course of ﬁve research trips to China between autumn 2015 and spring 2019.91

In total, I spent about seven months consulting different archive collections. Most of this time was dedicated to the Shanghai Municipal Archives (30 weeks), with shorter visits to the Beijing Municipal Archives (2 weeks) and Hangzhou Municipal Archives (2 weeks).

Notwithstanding introduction letters from local universities, I was denied any access to the post-1949 holdings of the Yunnan Provincial Archives, the Kunming Municipal Archives, and the Zhejiang Provincial Archives. The respective staffs justiﬁed their refusal by citing a lack of resources that had delayed the process of approving sections of the holdings for public access; municipal regulations that did not allow access without approval from the

Chinese Communist Party’s External Affairs Ofﬁce; and the political sensitivity of the period immediately before and after Mao’s death.

To my knowledge, at least one of these archives has since provided access to sources from the period, highlighting the ﬂexibility of the rules governing archival access and the self-serving nature of the explanations provided by the staff. Shorter visits to research collections kept at the East China Normal University, Jiaotong University, and the University

Service Center at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, together with visits to the Shanghai

Municipal Library and Yunnan Provincial Library, allowed me to collect complementary data.

If archival work provided the skeletal framework for this research, the procurement

90 Recent work include Lu, “Garbage Gleanings” on ethical concerns; Kraus, “Researching the History of the People’s Republic of China”; Boucher, “Les archives de la République populaire de Chine” on methodology; Tiffert, “Peering down the Memory Hole” on censorship and digitization; and Wagner, Erinnerungsverwaltung on the history of the institution; parallels to the Soviet ﬁeld are many, cf. von Hagen, “The Archival Gold Rush”; Getty, “Commercialization of Scholarship” on ethics; and more generally Raleigh, “Doing Soviet History.” 91 State archival sources used for this dissertation were collected from the Shanghai Municipal Archives (SHMA); Beijing Municipal Archives (BJMA); Hangzhou Municipal Archives (HZMA); and Suzhou Municipal Archives (SZMA). For the Suzhou archives, I am indebted to Zhang Man who generously shared copies she made during her visit there. In addition, I have consulted the following research collections: the Maoist Legacy Database (MLD); the Maoist Legacy Collection (MLC); the Universities Service Centre for China Studies (USCCS) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; and the Center for Contemporary Documents and Historical Materials at the East China Normal University (ECNU). For certain items, which have not yet been made available in digitized form or cannot be made available without violating the privacy of the individuals involved, I refer to my private collection. Any such item can be made available for consultation, in part or in full, upon request.

32 of documents from private collectors allowed me to ﬂesh out the narrative. Not unlike the market for court paraphernalia that appeared after the fall of the Qing dynasty, which the author Lu Xun disparagingly likened to how the poor would sift through the garbage of the rich, the nationwide movement to reorganize archival holdings in the years after

Mao’s death has given collectors access to ofﬁcial documents from the socialist past and

“garbology” has become something of an auxiliary science for some historians of the Peo- ple’s Republic.92 The fact that documents marked for pulping were instead sold to private collectors can be considered a failure on the part of the Communist Party to control its own past and, by the by, the life stories of millions. At the same time, the relative lack of policing of this gray market to this day, which has increasingly moved from flee-markets to online marketplaces, suggests, if not approval, a degree of indifference on the part of the authorities. This dissertation has depended on the market for old books and documents for four types of sources: classified or intrabureaucratic documents from high-level party organs and state ministries as well as internally circulated collections of such documents; procedural documents and work reports from low-level organs; reference works produced by and for functionaries, including compilations of statistics and institutional histories; and bulletins created by party, state organs, and mass organizations for internal circulation. In some cases, the documents are the same that one could find in state archives but which are not currently accessible. In other cases, they are of a type that state archives do not collect.

As historians of the recent Chinese past, it is tempting to talk of what we are doing in heroic terms as rescuing history from the dictatorship of state-enforced amnesia. The reality is far more mundane and the sprawling bureaucracy of the Chinese state encompasses many different logics and interests.93 My method depends, ultimately, on the cooperation or at least toleration of Chinese authorities. Recent signals from the government that undesirable investigation into the recent past may be interpreted as detrimental to public interest have highlighted the fragility inherent to a discipline that relies so heavily on state coopera-

92 Cassel, “Arkivet som problem.” 93 Lu, “Garbage Gleanings.”

33 tion and new possibilities for information control opened up by the digitization of archival holdings are cause for concern. Still, it would be an uninspired form of professionalism if historians of the People’s Republic would not take advantage of the access they do have just because the situation on the ground does not match the ideal. Real problems, like the fact that sources once obtained from the archives will not necessarily remain available to later researchers, thus rendering conventional veriﬁcation impossible, command reﬂection on research strategies and methodologies, and even epistemological assumptions.

Scholars of imperial China have long since grown accustomed to writing history without archives and now students of the country’s more recent past must devise methods for working with archives that do not behave in a way that the classically-trained historian believe they should. The success of a given archival project depends on the researcher’s ability to adapt to conditions that fall short of the ideal. The outline of my own experiences above illustrates the many uncertainties of the Chinese archival terrain, where access may be determined by how the researchers present themselves, their nationality, or their institutional afﬁliation. Because the rules governing access are vague at best, local staff often makes decisions on a case-to-case basis, which means that researchers may be confronted with very different principles for what can and cannot be consulted depending on which archive they visit at what time. In short, the discretional authority of local staff determines access. This problem is less pronounced at larger institutions, like the Shanghai Municipal

Archives, where procedures are relatively transparent and the researcher can access any digitized document without making an individual request. But at lower-level archives, where researchers are few and far between, access is negotiated rather than granted.

I have tried to adapt the presentation of evidence to match the speciﬁcities of the ﬁeld.

Repeated visits to the Shanghai Municipal Archives allowed me to appreciate changes over time, as archival folders appeared, disappeared, and reappeared. However, due to a lack of transparency in the process of declassification and reclassification, it is impossible for me to gauge with any precision the extent of the fluctuations. For this reason, the list of archival references includes not only folder and document titles, folder identification and

34 page numbers, but also the time of consultation. Furthermore, I have provided access to digitized versions of documents in my own possession to the extent allowed by intellectual property law and privacy considerations.

Overview

Chapter 1 contrasts the two forms of dispossession used by the Communist government after 1949: state seizure of enemy assets and state appropriation under the Redemption

Policy. State seizure was an administrative or legal measure that was either part of a criminal punishment or directed at enemy groups; it was a means of retribution as much as a tool of redistribution and as such targeted only those who were excluded from the political community that the Communist People referred to as “the people.” In the countryside, land belonging to landlords was seized and redistributed and the owners suffered violence and stigma. In the cities, seizures were directed against war criminals, counterrevolutionaries, wartime collaborators, and the bureaucrat-bourgeoisie. The symbolic exclusion of the bureaucrat-bourgeoisie, a group with no actual members on the mainland, served not just as means of revolutionary justice but also as an invitation to the national bourgeoise to take part in postwar reconstruction and the creation of a New China. When the state finally moved to appropriate private firms in the mid-1950s, the Redemption Policy offered capitalists limited compensation. This compensation was never intended as a payment equal to value lost, but to confirm that the capitalists would retain their place within the category of the people and be included in the socialist project.

Chapter 2 looks at the bureaucratic process of assimilating capitalists into the state system. Beginning with a pilot to systematize class assignment among the cotton wholesalers of a Shanghai district, the chapter shows that this type of classiﬁcation did not become anything more than a local experiment, despite the party’s commitment to a Marxist theory of class and its recognition of the particular position of the bourgeoisie under socialism. In- stead the public-private mergers required managers and entrepreneurs to give an account

35 for themselves, both through narrative autobiographies and by ﬁlling in class status and family class origins on resume forms. It shows how the Communist Party treated their past lives as both an asset and a liability: a capitalist identity signiﬁed expertise and skills, but also an exploitative and reactionary mindset. Consequently, the party’s policy toward the capitalists was characterized by an uneasy balance between treating them as resources to be exploited and viewing them as compromising the integrity or even the security of socialist institutions.

Chapter 3 turns to the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward’s catastrophic collapse. This put a deﬁnite end to the optimistic view according to which the exploitive classes would be able to quickly reform their reactionary mentality through hard work and political studies.

The capitalist question was actualized when the state downsized the urban population in an emergency effort to alleviate the pressure on the countryside to supply the cities with grain. In this context, the party leadership elected to keep the capitalists in the cities while reinforcing the institutions and policies that maintained this group as a separate population. In 1963, the Federation of Industry and Commerce carried out the ﬁrst ever census of the capitalist population in major cities to give an idea of its composition and living conditions. Around the same time, the State Council announced that the policy of paying out dividends would be prolonged. With no signs that the capitalist status would disappear in the near future, the dividends were the basis for a system of mutual aid for a population excluded from the regular welfare system. At the same time, the separate organization of the capitalists set the stage for an intensiﬁcation of the politics of class that came to a head in the Cultural Revolution.

Chapter 4 takes a long view on the great wave of house raids that swept through Chi- nese cities in August 1966. Most of the raids, which were carried out by groups of students as part of the Red Guard movement, took place within the course of a few weeks, but the politics and logistics involved in storing and returning conﬁscated property continued for decades to come. In the ﬁrst few years after the raids, restitution was restricted to illegitimate targets of the raids. The capitalists had been the main target of the raids, but their

36 ambiguous status complicated the question of restitution. This chapter argues that the le-

gitimacy of the conﬁscation and destruction of personal belongings by the Red Guards was

in question from the very beginning and that the early bureaucratic response prepared the way for later restitution. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the expansion of restitution went through two important stages. The ﬁrst accompanied the restoration of regular party

institutions and operational norms in the 1970s when the party leadership conﬁrmed that

the dispossession of capitalists and other liminal groups had been illegitimate. The second

followed the declaration in 1978 that the Cultural Revolution itself had been an illegitimate

departure from socialist legality and values. Thus, the house raids became a generalized wrong.

Chapter 5 starts with the radicalization of class politics in the 1960s. The renewed em-

phasis on class struggle increased social pressure on capitalists and their families, reaching

a critical point with the political assault on the United Front in the early months of the

Cultural Revolution. Once the institutions set up for the management of capitalists were

gone, so was the protected status they had beneﬁted from under the United Front framework. Red Guards and worker rebels subverted party norms by treating the capitalist as

a “black type” instead of an essentially ambiguous kind. This radical challenge actualized

the capitalist problem. The Communist Party’s response was twofold. On the one hand, it

began a gradual restoration of the United Front. On the other, it instructed work units to

undertake “differentiation work”: a reclassiﬁcation of petty merchants and smalltime busi-

nessowners who had been inappropriately designated as capitalists in the mid-1950s. The

reclassiﬁcation never left the pilot stage during Mao’s lifetime. Instead, it was extended

across the country in 1979 as part of a broader project to address the excesses and injustices

of the recent past. At this point, the reclassiﬁcation of capitalists served as an instrument

of depoliticization as class lost its former meaning. Like the revolution, capitalist identity

became a heritage.

37 1 Bourgeois types

Seven years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China all major industrial enterprises had been placed under state control. At the same time, private commerce all but disappeared as even streetside peddlers and stallkeepers were organized into cooperative teams. Socialism put an end to the private industry and commerce but the private economy’s prospects had looked bleak even before the Communists came to power.1 Toward the end of the Civil War, one renowned Chinese scholar observed that the difference between a Guomindang victory and a Communist victory would come down to state control over most new industries versus the probable nationalization of all major new industries.2

Through their wartimes actions, both contenders for power had demonstrated repeatedly that they were willing to weaken or suspend property rights in the name of social justice and the good of the nation. In this sense, the Civil War pitted one anti-capitalist party against another.

Still, the Communist Party was set apart from its rival by a principled opposition to the very institution of private property. In the ﬁnal days of the Second World War, when victory against Japan looked certain and armed conﬂict with the Guomindang had yet to resume, the decorated general Lin Biao had a moment to think about the party’s historical mission:

Of course, we could have picked a different name, the Chinese People’s Party,

1 Needless to say, socialism did not put an end to illicit economic activities; both black market and underground workshops continued to operate at the margins of the socialist system throughout the Maoist period. There were also certain exceptions to socialist transition, most remarkable was perhaps the continued importance of rental property as cities struggled to provide adequate housing for all its residents, and in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward there was even a limited reopening to small-scale market activities—on the latter point, see Feng, “Ziyou shichang zhengce yanjiu.” 2 This prediction by Shi Guoheng is quoted in Gerth, “Wu Yunchu and the Fate of the Bourgeoisie,” 176.

38 the Revolutionary Party, the Liberation Party would all have been alright, but

no matter what we would still aim to resolve the “property” question. What

concentrated goal are we ﬁghting for? Getting “property,” not private property,

but public property; for everybody to get rich, for everybody to lead a good life.

So why do we need a revolution? Because many people cannot continue to live

like they are doing. To make everybody lead better lives, that is why there has

to be a revolution.3

Common property (共产 gongchan) was the reason for the party’s existence, the goal of

the revolution it spearheaded, and the basis for its name. In Lin Biao’s take on socialism,

the party was responding to a popular desire to “get” property, of which he found evidence

in customary new year’s greetings and on celebratory couplets with their wishes of wealth.

He proposed a simple solution: the people would “wrest the fruits of production out of

the hands of capitalists.”4 However, besides ﬁghting words, the general offered no further

insights as to when and how the dispossession of capitalists would come to pass.

Once in power, the Communist Party never seriously considered “wresting” capital

from the hands of capitalists to be a viable strategy. Instead, the period of New Democracy was characterized by postwar reconstruction and government support for ailing private

businesses. This was a time of increasing restrictions and controls on the private sector, but without an ofﬁcial program for nationalization. Instead, the concerted effort to eliminate

private enterprise took place in a three-year period that began with the 1953 adoption of a

program for socialist transition.

The Chinese Communists came to adopt the view that the bourgeoisie could be divided

into two strains and translated this into two distinct modes of dispossession. As the Com-

munists took control over the cities in the ﬁnal stages of the Civil War, they launched a

campaign to expropriate ﬁrms and property belonging to bureaucrat-capitalists, war crimi-

3 Speech at the Seventh National Congress, May 22, 1945, in Lin, Lin biao wenji, 156; compare with the partial translation in Schoenhals, “Political Movements, Change and Stability,” 595. Minor differences in translation may reﬂect variations in the sources used or stylistic choices. 4 Lin, Lin biao wenji, 157.

39 nals, and collaborators. If the takeover was important because it gave the new government immediate control over strategic industries, its framing in political communication and legal documents served to disseminate ideas about what acts determined belonging within the newly established community. The land redistribution that accompanied regime transition in the countryside was matched by a more limited form of revolutionary dispossession in the cities, which the new government framed not so much as redistributive justice as an act of retribution against a corrupt political and economic elite. As shown below, the exclusion of the bureaucrat-bourgeoise made possible the inclusion of the national bourgeoisie. Although the economic policies of the war and immediate postwar period had left little room for an independent private sector, the Communists allowed the second capitalist type to maintain a degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the state until the transition to socialism in the mid-1950s. Then, in a departure from Soviet precedence, they adopted a policy of ﬁnan- cial compensation to reduce resistance toward nationalization. The terms of payment were set by the state and the capitalists had little choice but to accept an arrangement that was

“voluntary” in name only. Yet, the terms of the buyout were important because they signi-

ﬁed the formal inclusion of the capitalists into the socialist community and the continued recognition of the historical entitlement of this class.

1.1 On the bureaucrat-bourgeoisie

The idea that the Chinese bourgeoisie could be divided into two arose from the theory of imperialism. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin came to believe that the strategy appropriate for revolutionary struggle in the colonial setting had to be different from the one designed for

Europe. He understood societies located at the periphery of the capitalist system as being at the same time caught at the intersection of two vectors of oppression: one being domestic class oppression and the other the economic and political domination of colonial powers.

Translated into strategic terms, this called for an alliance with the so-called national bourgeoisie against imperialist forces. At an earlier point, when the outcome of October was

40 still uncertain, Lenin had even contemplated the idea of cooperating with the Russian bour-

geoisie so as to avoid a devastating confrontation, but the breakout of the Civil War put a

deﬁnite end to any plans for conciliatory transition in which the state would buy out the

capitalists. An end in Russia, that is, for in 1922 the Comintern adopted a mutated form

of Lenin’s idea of cooperation as its doctrine for “oppressed” nations, notwithstanding de-

ferring opinions from revolutionary agents who, unlike Lenin, had actual experience in the

colonies and were uneasy about entering into an alliance with their capitalist compatriots.5

The second capitalist type, the bureaucrat-bourgeoisie, was a Chinese invention. It orig-

inated in a politically heated and theoretically advanced debate concerning the nation’s

incorporation into the capitalist world economy.6 In the 1920s, a major topic in this debate was how to describe the origins and function of a new class that occupied an intermediary

position in the unequal relationship between the imperial government and colonial pow-

ers. A product of China’s particular experience of colonialism, this was the class that some

referred to as comprador.7 Qu Qiubai, Communist leader and sociologist with red eye-

glasses, preferred to call it the bureaucrat-bourgeoisie.

Qu ﬁrst used the term bureaucrat-bourgeoisie in an essay written for the Communist pe-

riodical Vanguard upon his return from the Soviet Union in 1923.8 The essay explained both

historically and theoretically the counterintuitive observation that a domestic bourgeoisie

had developed in the years after the Opium War when the extraction of resources by colo-

nial powers was at its most intense. Qu argued that while it was true that imperialism

had hindered the overall development of national industry, foreign investors had neverthe-

less required infrastructure, capital goods, and natural resources to sustain their ventures

in China. Because the country never became an outright colony, there was no colonial ad-

ministration in place that could provide such goods. A domestic class of capitalists with

5 Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919-1927, 47–48. 6 For an overview and assessment of this debate, and the work of Wang Ya’nan in particular, see Osterhammel, China und die Weltgesellschaft, 172–4. 7 Osterhammel explains that where non-Chinese literature tend to use the term comprador in a narrow sense, to refer to a formal status, Chinese works have productively deployed it in a broader sense to refer to various forms of mediation of foreign business interests, Osterhammel, 186–7. 8 Qu, “Zhongguo zichanjieji de fazhan.”

41 close links to the imperial court appeared to ﬁll this demand. In Qu’s deﬁnition, it was thus

China’s unique relationship with the colonial powers that gave rise to bureaucrat-capital and the bureaucrat-bourgeoisie.9 In this sense, the designation was used interchangeably with comprador, a close association reﬂected by the rather clunky compound “bureaucrat- comprador-bourgeoisie” that was sometimes used by indecisive party scribes. However,

Qu’s term implied a complicity on the part of the own government that the word comprador did not. This aspect was put forward when the Communist Party revived the term in the

Civil War.

In the latter stages of the Civil War, the Communist Party adapted its rhetoric on the bourgeoise to a new urban strategy which prioritized industrial production and economic recovery over class struggle. In wartime Yan’an, Mao had sketched out a theory of the bourgeoisie’s position vis-à-vis the revolutionary movement that deﬁned the national bourgeoisie in economic terms as a capitalist substratum constituted by the less wealthy members of a class dominated by what he called the big bourgeoisie.10 Eight years later, in

May 1948, party stalwart Xu Dixin published an essay in Qunzhong warning revolutionaries that the very mentioning of “eliminating [消减 xiaojian] exploitation and oppression by the big bourgeoisie” could scare away “some friends, especially some friends in industry and trade.”11 From now on, the author argued, political afﬁliation and not socio-economic position should decide whether a capitalist was a friend or an enemy of the revolution.

The year before, Xu had penned a synthetic work on bureaucrat-capital that drew on the writings of some of the Communist Party’s most skillful pens.12 In the Civil War, Com- munist agitators revived and repurposed Qu Qiubai’s bureaucrat-capitalist to assimilate

9 In the 1920s and 30s, the themes of Qu Qiubai’s essay were developed by other prominent Marxists, including Cai Heshen, Li Da, and Lü Zhenyu, see Zhang, “Zhonggong dui guanliao ziben jingji de renshi ji zhengce,” 109–10. 10 Cf. Mao, “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party”; Mao, “On New Democracy.” 11 SHMA: D2-0-757, 4-5 12 Xu Dixin explicitly acknowledged his debt to Chen Boda “China’s Four Big Families” (中国四大家族 Zhongguo si da jiazu), Chen Hansheng “Monopoly Capital and China’s Civil War” (独占资本与中国内战 Duzhan ziben yu Zhongguo neizhan), and Wang Ya’nan “Analysis of the Theory of China’s Bureaucrat-Capital” (中国官僚资本之理论的分析 Zhongguo guanliao ziben zhi lilun de fenxi). Another important intervention was the collection of essays by prominent economists and party ofﬁcials, with contributions from the likes Ma Yinchu and Zhou Enlai, published as a program for “political democracy” and “economic democracy,” see Fang et al., Lun Guanliao Ziben.

42 entrenched hostility toward political and economic elites. During the war against Japanese

occupation, the Guomindang’s preference for state-led, technocratic development and poli-

cies gearing the economy toward national defense had created conditions for enrichment

for entrepreneurs with ties to the state but left many others struggling.13 Even among those who suffered from extractive policies and market restrictions, many would actively sup-

port measures, against their business interests, that they saw as contributing to the war

to resist Japan. This is not to suggest that all capitalists actively resisted occupation, most

certainly found themselves somewhere along the continuum between collaboration and ac-

quiescence.14 The point, rather, is that the state did not impose militarization on a passive

society and that many entrepreneurs were invested not just in the survival of their ﬁrms but

to an equal or even greater extent in the survival of the nation and consequently accepted

or even invited the change.15 Once the war had been won, however, the entrepreneurial

commitment to the own nation did not automatically translate into an alignment with the

Guomindang in its conﬂict with the Communists. The same concessions that might have

been tolerated during the war were not necessarily accepted after it had ended. To make

matters worse, the Guomindang continued its expansion of the state sector and the planned

economy after the war, ignoring advice from allies abroad to “privatize” industry.16

The second half of 1948 saw a particularly striking display of how little regard the Guo-

mindang had left for private enterprise as the party implemented harsh emergency mea-

sures to combat depression in markets and hyperinﬂation. In Shanghai, Jiang Jingguo, son

of the Guomindang leader, ordered raids on factories and private residences in search of

hidden wealth and evidence of speculation in a forerunner to the Five Antis campaign that

the Communist Party would launch four years later.17 Jiang did not consider the prop-

13 The technocratic policies of the Nanjing government have been treated in Kirby, “The Chinese War Economy”; Kirby, “Engineering China”; and Bergère, Capitalismes et capitalistes, 145–67; on the effects of such policies, see Coble, The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government; and more recently Sheehan, Industrial Eden; and Feng, Zhengshang Zhongguo. 14 Coble, Chinese Capitalists in Japan’s New Order. 15 Michael Geyer argues that militarization is not so much imposed on society by the state, but accepted or even invited by some of the most inﬂuential members of a “society that organizes itself in and for war,” see Geyer, “The Stigma of Violence, Nationalism, and War in Twentieth-Century Germany,” 80. 16 Kirby, “Continuity and Change,” 132. 17 Bergère, Capitalismes et capitalistes, 186–87.

43 Figure 1.1: Caricature of bureaucrat-capital blaming wages for driving up inﬂation

44 erty rights of his targets to hold much weight: “Their wealth and their foreign-style homes are built on the skeletons of the people. How is their conduct any different from that of armed robbers?”18 The campaign ﬁt perfectly with the revamped story of the bureaucrat- bourgeoisie that was gaining importance in the Communist Party’s version of what ailed the nation.

Xu’s On Bureaucrat-Capital established him as one of the party’s foremost specialists on the bourgeoisie.19 In the latter stages of the Civil War, party intellectuals revived the concept of the bureaucrat-bourgeoise not so much to discuss colonial domination as to agitate against the Guomindang. Although Xu kept to Qu Qiubai’s theory by conceding that the historical origins of bureaucrat-capital dated back to a period before Guomindang rule, he insisted that the predatory economy created by the current regime had given bureaucrat- capital unprecedented importance, to the detriment of both national development and domestic entrepreneurship. The benefactors of this arrangement, he proposed using a term coined by Mao’s secretary Chen Boda, were the Four Big Families led by the Guomindang leader Jiang Jieshi; the Chen brothers of the right-wing CC Clique; the tycoon Song Ziwen; and the banker and ﬁnance minister Kong Xiangxi. In Xu’s account, the Guomindang’s economic policies were little more than a racket set up to beneﬁt these four clans, intertwined through marriage, personal alliance, and special interest.20 This rhetoric of conspiracy prepared the way for the dispossession of bureaucrat-capitalists.

The move to focus hostility toward the Four Families was matched by a message of con- ciliation and cooperation directed to the great majority of Chinese business owners who had no ties to the Guomindang leadership. This second group was the subject of Xu’s Qun- zhong essay. Here, he described a state of confusion as to what was the referent of the term

“big bourgeoisie.” He framed his argument as a modest attempt at greater conceptual pre-

18 Quoted in Eastman, Seeds of Destruction, 182. 19 Xu, Guanliao ziben lun. 20 Although this image became rhetorically effective in the Civil War because it captured popular sentiment, scholars have since questioned the explanatory value of the notion of a bureaucrat-bourgeoisie in the writing of Chi- nese economic history, see for example Wright, The Chinese Economy in the Early Twentieth Century; and Feng, Zhengshang Zhongguo.

45 cision rather than a terminological overhaul because the term in question was still integral to the party leadership’s vocabulary. Most notably, Mao had used it in his classic essay on China’s social classes to advocate for a strategic alliance with the lower stratum of the bourgeoisie against the wealthiest capitalists.21 This representation of society, inspired by the Comintern’s strategy for revolutionary struggles in colonized and semi-colonized countries, had been elevated to the status of party line following the author’s rise to power. Un- able to avoid such an important term, Xu instead redeﬁned it to become synonymous with bureaucrat-bourgeoisie as used by himself and other party theorists: “China’s big bourgeoisie is a bureaucrat-bourgeoisie in direct service of imperialism and with close ties to domestic landlords and rich peasants.”

The contrast to Mao’s analysis—which had categorically stated that all large-scale banking, industry, and commerce was related to foreign capital and thus comprador in character—was stark.22 No longer was economic wealth or relationship to the means of production the big bourgeoisie’s deﬁning feature, but rather its opposition to the emancipatory struggle against feudalism and imperialism. There was no political urgency,

Xu surmised, attached to the question of where to draw the line between big, middle, and small among the party’s friends in the business world. The conceptual groundwork had been laid to redeﬁne revolutionary struggle in terms of political alignment rather than social class.

A sympathetic response to Xu’s essay, which appeared in Qunzhong two months later, provided a model for this conceptualization of the bourgeoisie.23 In this follow-up, the author drew up a fourfold schema that separated the bourgeoisie into opposing pairs based on class essence and a less important quantitative character (Figure 1.2). On the one axis, economic criteria were used to oppose the big bourgeoisie and the middle and petty bourgeoisie. In support of Xu Dixin, the author argued that the more fundamental divide was the perpendicular opposition between the national bourgeoisie and the bureaucrat-

21 Mao, “Analysis of All the Classes in Chinese Society.” 22 Mao, 252. 23 SHMA: D2-0-760, 15-18

46 Figure 1.2: Fourfold schematization of the Chinese bourgeoisie (Qunzhong 1948)

47 bourgeoisie. In this schematization, the separation of wealthy from less wealthy was clearly secondary to the question of afﬁliation in the Communist Party’s conﬂict with the

Guomindang. Repurposed in such a way, the notion of the bureaucrat-bourgeoisie served to frame the Civil War not as a war between the working classes and their exploiters but as a national liberation war against a conspiratorial clique at the pinnacle of the Guomindang government.

The Common Program of the Chinese People’s Consultative Conference put the distinction between the national bourgeoisie and the bureaucrat-bourgeoisie into law. The program, which stood in as the new state’s fundamental law from the founding of the Peo- ple’s Republic in 1949 until the adoption of the ﬁrst constitution in 1954, listed in its very

first article the elements constituting the category called “the people” (人民 renmin). The people, it declared, was made up of four classes: workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie. Each of these classes were given a yellow star on the new national flag which were positioned in a constellation dominated by a fifth, larger star—the star of the vanguard party. The legal distinction between people and nationals tracked the political distinction between the community of the people and the national community. Unlike the national community, the people was held together not by a mythology of shared traditions or common descent but by another kind of heritage: a constitutive myth of a revolutionary alliance between workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie. In other words, it was a community forged through the struggle for national liberation.

The Common Program set forth the new state’s principled opposition to the forces of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism. It also listed types of people, or more precisely non-people, who were members of the nation but excluded from the people. In

Article 7 we ﬁnd the bureaucrat-capitalists, next to “feudal landlords” and the kitchen-sink category “reactionaries.” Sharing all the obligations that came with nationality, these types were deprived from the economic protection and political rights—deﬁned as the right to vote and the freedom of speech, assembly, and association—reserved for the people.24 The

24 It is interesting to note that the People’s Republic of China deﬁned the class composition of the “people” from the

48 Common Program declared them targets of dispossession and disenfranchisement. As per

Article 3: “The People’s Republic of China must abolish all the prerogatives of imperialist

countries in China. It must conﬁscate bureaucrat-capital and put it into the possession of

the people’s state. It must systematically transform the feudal and semi-feudal land own-

ership system into a system of peasant land ownership […]” Once dispossessed, the state

committed to provide them with “some means of livelihood” while compelling them to

“reform themselves through labor so as to become new men” (Art. 7).

Neither the Common Program nor the writings of Xu Dixin and other party scribes came with a set of criteria for distinguishing between the national and bureaucrat strands of the

bourgeoisie. It is no wonder, therefore, that the renowned “Matchstick King” Liu Hong-

sheng worried upon his return to Shanghai from Hong Kong in November 1949 that he

might not qualify as a national capitalist. After all, he had functioned as a comprador for a

British ﬁrm and managed a state-owned enterprise for the Guomindang.25 Moreover, Liu

had reasons to be concerned about the Communist Party’s public vow to pursue collabo-

rators who had been protected by the Guomindang. This seemed to apply directly to two

of Liu’s sons, who had only narrowly escaped prosecution thanks to his inﬂuence with the

Nationalist government.26 Premier Zhou Enlai personally dispelled Liu’s worries. Zhou

explained that the party deployed the epithet bureaucrat-bourgeoisie with great elasticity:

such labels were simply used to signal approval of one group (the national capitalists) and

disapproval of another (the compradors and bureaucrat-capitalists).27 The party decided who was bureaucrat-capitalist. But in this case, the leadership did not wield its discursive

authority to single out enemies but rather to collectively exempt capitalists on the mainland

from expropriation.28

outset but had no law on nationality until 1980 (although the principle of jus sanguinis was applied in practice), see Shao, “Chinese by Deﬁnition,” 5. 25 Cochran and Hsieh, The Lius of Shanghai, 289–90. 26 Xia, Down with Traitors, 100. 27 Cochran, “Capitalists Choosing Communist China,” 370. 28 It would be easy to draw a parallel to the phrase “I decide who is Jewish,” variously attributed to Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring and associated with the rare possibility to bestow “useful” Jews with the status of Honorary Aryan. Despite testimonies to the contrary, by the likes of director Fritz Lang, it is quite certain that this quote is neither from Goebbels nor Göring. When it came to exempting Jews from anti-semitic legislation,

49 1.2 A category without demography

Among the enemy types listed in the Common Program, only the bureaucrat-bourgeoisie was so narrowly deﬁned as to include only those who had permanently left the country behind. In other words, it was the only enemy category without a corresponding demography in the territory controlled by the People’s Government. There are no records of struggle sessions at which bureaucrat-capitalists would have appeared, heads bowed down, in front of angry crowds. No bureaucrat-capitalist was named among the tens of thousands arrested and thousands shot when the Shanghai authorities worked to meet the quota Mao had set for the 1950 campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries. When Mao spoke of the kinds of elements the campaign was supposed to wipe out, he mentioned no capitalists of any kind—bureaucrat or otherwise—and they did not appear in CCP Central Group of Ten’s taxonomy of hidden counterrevolutionaries and bad elements ﬁve years later.29 Liu Shaoqi mentioned bureaucrat-capitalists at the Second National Public Security Conference in Oc- tober 1950, it is true, but not as part of the ongoing purge. Instead, his instructions to collect evidence were made in preparation for the adjudication of criminals “driven away” from the mainland following the conquest of Taiwan—an event that had become highly theoretical following the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet into the Strait in response to the breakout of the

Korean War earlier that year.30

An absentee enemy of the people, the bureaucrat-capitalist soon vanished from public discourse. This ﬁgure, which had proven so useful during the Civil War, retained only an academic relevance after 1949 despite the fact that the victory over bureaucrat-capitalism was part of the historical justiﬁcation for the Communist Party’s unique authority within

the Führer alone had this power under the Nuremberg laws, as explained in Koop, ”Wer Jude ist, bestimme ich”, ”Ehrenarier” im Nationalsozialismus, 9. There is a parallel to be drawn to the astonishing personal authority of Mao and, to a lesser extent, other party leaders but the comparison with socialist China ends here. As proposed in the introduction and demonstrated in the following, this study ﬁnds that the logic and pattern of state violence in the Chinese case had little to do with a radically modern quest for order that some scholars take to be the root cause of Nazi terror. 29 Mao talked instead of the need to eliminate bandit leaders, secret agents and enemy assets, and despotic landlords, see Yang, “Reconsidering the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries.”, 104, 107; the Group of Ten listed eleven types of counterrevolutionaries and four types of bad elements, MLD: 662 30 Liu, “Liu Shaoqi zai dier ci quanguo gong’an huiyi shang de jianghua,” 16–19.

50 the political system, and as such the term remains to this day in the preamble of the Con-

stitution of the People’s Republic of China.31 Discursively removed from the mainland, the

bureaucrat-capitalists nevertheless left two things behind that required some form of admin-

istrative response: relatives and property. One received scant attention from the authorities,

the other was fundamental not only to establish early state control over the economy but

also for securing revolutionary justice.

As the number of bureaucrat-capitalist family members was far too inconsequential to

merit any policy of their own, they were treated with the same mix of interest and suspicion

as other taishu (台属, lit. “Taiwan relatives”). The single most famous person in the category was Song Qingling. The Songs were one of the Four Big Families. Indeed, considering her

brother’s high position in the Guomindang government and her two sisters’ marriages to

banker Kong Xiangxi and Jiang Jieshi, it is no exaggeration to say that the Songs were the

glue that held together the concept of a bureaucrat-bourgeoisie. And yet, the Communist

Party held Song Qingling in high regard due to her progressive politics, friendly ties to the

Soviet Union, and marriage to the late revolutionary leader Sun Zhongshan. Although she was never admitted into the Communist Party, it is no exaggeration to say that she was the

most important representative of the progressive alliance that backed its government, and

as such she held several key ministerial and diplomatic positions, including that of vice

president, after 1949.32

A less fortunate family member was Gao “Berlin,” whose nickname was an embarrass-

ing reminder of his father’s comprador service for the Germans. In 1952, “Berlin” was sen-

tenced to twelve years of labor reform (later reduced to four) for having bribed Guomin-

dang ofﬁcials to shut down the investigation into his father’s collaboration with Japanese

occupiers.33 When compared to Liu Hongsheng’s sons, who had escaped punishment on

31 According to the Schmittian reading of the PRC Constitution that has gained traction among certain legal scholars in China today, the Communist Party’s historical role in leading the people to overthrow the rule of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat-capitalism remains to this day one of the fundamental sources of its legitimacy as the “basis and the core” of the Chinese government, see Jiang, “Written and Unwritten Constitutions,” 23, 25; cf. Mittelstaedt, “Understanding China’s Two Constitutions.” 32 Lee and Stefanowska, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, 466–74. 33 MLD: 4959

51 comparable charges, the case adds to the image of uneven enforcement of postwar justice and the flexibility of the Communist Party when it came to identifying and adjudicating collaborators. It is significant, finally, that “Berlin” was punished for collaboration and not as a bureaucrat-capitalist.

Far more interesting to the Communist leadership than family members left behind was the question of property. In discussions with Stalin’s envoy to Xibaipo in February 1949,

Mao explained that bureaucrat-capital stood for the majority of China’s industry and infrastructure, which would greatly facilitate state control over the economy. Indeed, he explicitly credited the wartime economic organization built up under the Japanese and the

Guomindang with having created favorable conditions for industrial development. Their wartime policies had encouraged the concentration of capital in the state’s hand, not least in the Northeast where the state owned forty-seven percent of industry and only six percent was strictly private.34 Through the conﬁscation of bureaucrat-capital, the same economic organization that the Four Big Families had built to monopolize “the economic lifelines of the whole country,” as Mao had put it in an indictment of the Guomindang leadership in

1947, would provide the basis, as he framed the issue two years later, for popular control of the very same lifelines.35 Bureaucrat-capital was a reactionary boon to the revolution; the high concentration of state control over strategic industries had put the country well on its way to socialism.

On this point, Mao could rely on one of the classics in the Marxist-Leninist canon.

Lenin’s 1921 pamphlet “The Tax In Kind,” from which Mao had learned about state capitalism as a preparatory stage before socialism, had praised the German war economy for having become “‘the last word’ in modern large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organization.”36 Lenin believed that this economic model was distinct from the system of “Junker-bourgeois imperialism” from which it had emerged and that it could be

34 Mikoyan, “Memorandum of Conversation Between Anastas Mikoyan and Mao Zedong, February 05, 1949.” 35 Mao, “The Present Situation and Our Tasks,” 167; Mao, “Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China,” 367. 36 Li, Mao and the Economic Stalinization of China, 1948–1953, 70.

52 put to work for a progressive agenda.37 The only thing that the revolutionaries had to do,

he wrote, was to cross out the words in italics and they would have “a Soviet state, that

is, a proletarian state” that met all the necessary conditions for socialism. The Chinese

Communists applied the same logic when they crossed out the word “bureaucratic” in

front of capital expropriated in the name of the “people.”

1.3 From friend-enemy distinction…

The so-called Committee for Researching the Jiangnan Question was the ﬁrst to map out

bureaucrat-capital in Shanghai. In March 1949, it issued the thirty-volume set Shanghai

Investigation Materials.38 Behind the generic pseudonym given as the author of the materials was the intelligence branch of the Communist Party’s East China Bureau and it was its

agents in the revolutionary underground who had collected the relevant survey data. In

the weeks leading up to the ﬁnal battle for Shanghai, the set passed around among the

ﬁve thousand cadres who had gathered in the small town of Danyang, some two hundred

kilometers up the Yangtze river, in preparation for administrative takeover.39 Two of the volumes listed the bureaucrat-enterprises in the city’s industrial and commercial sectors.

The China Petroleum Corporation was the subject of the very ﬁrst entry in the volume

on bureaucrat-enterprises in Shanghai’s industrial sector. The cooperation belonged to the

National Resources Commission, an agency at the forefront of the Guomindang’s plan to

reconstruct China through military-industrial development that had grown into a sprawl-

ing bureaucracy. At one point it counted about 33,000 staff members and 230,000 workers

and controlled 67.3 per cent of China’s total industrial capital.40 As for the China Petroleum

Corporation, it ﬁt into the Commission’s strategy by consolidating the Guomindang gov-

37 Lenin, “Tax in Kind,” 334. 38 The East China Bureau’s Social Affairs Department, as the intelligence branch was known, had been set up in October 1946 to counter regional operations by the Guomindang’s secret service, see Zhang, Zhang, and Zhang, “Huadongju Shehuibu Dashiji,” I am grateful to Jiang Huajie who pointed me in the direction of this source; The Social Affairs Department compiled comparable, if less comprehensive, materials for the earlier takeovers of Nanjing (twenty-two volumes) and Hangzhou (one volume), Xu, “Shilun Kangzhan Shengli Hou Shanghai Guoyou Gongye de Kuozhang,” 108. 39 Wakeman, “Cleanup,” 24. 40 Kirby, “Continuity and Change,” 205; Kirby, State and Economy in Republican China, 150–52.

53 ernment’s efforts to expand its share of a domestic fuel market dominated by U.S. oil con- glomerates. The entry on the China Petroleum Corporation in the Shanghai Investigation

Materials included a short history of the company, addresses, telephone numbers, statistics on employees, revenues, and so on.

After bureaucrat-capital had been mapped out came the actual takeover. On May 28, just one day after the Guomindang’s retreat from the city, the People’s Liberation Army posted soldiers to guard the China Petroleum Corporation’s facilities and support the new management.41 The soldiers were under strict orders not to interfere with the operation of the companies that it had taken over.42 There were no changes to salaries or staff hierarchies and the companies were protected not only from the reorganization that the Communists carried out in other parts of the bureaucracy—with training programs and dismissals designed to isolate staff compromised by their past loyalties—but also from the mass lay-offs, bankruptcies, and labor unrest that plagued Shanghai’s private sector as the century moved across its mid-point.43 Weng Wenhao, the former director of the China Petroleum Corpora- tion and of the National Resources Commission, had ﬂed the country under accusations of war crimes.44 Only two years later Weng was able to negotiate a safe return to the mainland where he was not only spared punishment, but given a prestigious position in the People’s

Political Consultative Conference.45 He was not alone, the entire senior leadership of the

National Resources Commission chose to serve under the Communists rather than to leave for Taiwan.46

The People’s Liberation Army moved quickly to seize control over bureaucrat-

41 Shanghai lianyouchang zhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Shanghai lianyouchang zhi, 22. 42 Zhongyang dang’anguan, “Zhongyang guanyu jieguan guanliao ziben qiye de zhishi.” 43 On unrest in Shanghai’s industry in the period follow Communist takeover, see Frazier, The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace, 97–98; the opposite approach applied to other branches of the administration, where the new leadership sought precisely to “upset” existing hierarchies through collective training programs and layoffs to isolate or terminate undesirable members of the staff, U, “The Making of Zhishifenzi,” 105. 44 On December 25, 1948, a Xinhua cable published the names of forty-three “major war criminals” in the Guo- mindang. It was signed by “an authoritative figure in Shaanbei,” a pseudonym for Mao Zedong. Among the forty-three war criminals, five chose to remain or return to the mainland and were rewarded with high-ranking positions and political protection. Only one, field commander Du Yuming, was captured and kept as a prisoner of war until pardoned by President Liu Shaoqi in 1959, after which Du also received a position in the CPPCC, see Yi, “43 ming Guomindang zhanfan.” 45 Li Xuetong, Weng wenhao nianpu, 362, 377. 46 Kirby, “Continuity and Change,” 134.

54 enterprises and to protect them from sabotage as the enemy withdrew. By July 1949,

Shanghai’s military government had assumed control over 411 entities that had previously

belonged to the Guomindang state, including factories, banks, and warehouses. From

its predecessor, the new government inherited one third of the city’s machine industry,

one ﬁfth of its steel foundries, and two ﬁfths of the cotton mills.47 Across the country,

the Communists were able to dominate the production and distribution of coal, steel and

iron, chemicals, machines and other strategic industries that had come under partial or

full state control over years of conﬂict. Built for war, the state industries of the old regime were easily incorporated into the new regime’s development strategy, which continued

to prioritize heavy industry and national defense. As the decision of the National Re-

source Commission’s leadership to remain on the mainland illustrates, the legacy from

the wartime organization of the Chinese economy was a matter not just of state sector

inheritance, but also development strategy, planning, and personnel.48

There was continuity also in the Communist Party’s method of dispossession. Xu Dixin,

the bureaucrat-capitalist specialist, had been called back from Hong Kong in April 1949 and

accompanied the People’s Liberation Army as it entered Shanghai the following month. The

city’s military government made him the head of its Bureau for Industry and Commerce

and in this capacity Xu led the second phase in the conﬁscation of enemy assets.49 Over the

next couple of years, the government put a regulatory framework in place for bureaucratic

expropriation, most of which was carried out without the involvement of courts, includ-

ing “Measures for Sorting out Public Shares and Public Assets within Companies” passed

in January 1951 and “Directive on Conﬁscating the Property of War Criminals, Collabora-

tors, Bureaucrat-Capitalists, and Counterrevolutionaries” from the following month.50 The

scope of expropriation summed up in the directive’s title is a reminder that revolutionary

47 Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei tongzhanbu, Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiushi, and Shanghai shi dang’anguan, ZZGSYSG (Shanghai), II:1455; despite the state expansion into the production of textile and other consumer goods during the Civil War, these were still mostly private and more important to the economy as a whole than the defense industry, see Bramall, Chinese Economic Development, 87–89. 48 Kirby, “Continuity and Change”; see also Kirby, “Engineering China”; Kirby, “The Chinese War Economy.” 49 SHMA: B182-1-2, 51-53. Separately, the city’s housing and ﬁnancial bureaus conducted investigations to identify enemy possession of real estate and bank deposits. 50 MLD: 2541

55 justice was inextricably mixed up with postwar retribution. The same applies to the carrot- and-stick policy that the heads of Shanghai’s interim military government put in place to mobilize the people in the search for enemy capital which closely resembled the one the

Guomindang had put in place to unearth hanjian assets.51 Under this scheme, informants were allowed to keep up to twenty percent of conﬁscated foodstuff or, in the case of seized real estate or company shares, were entitled to an unspeciﬁed monetary compensation. In addition to material rewards, informants had the right to have their patriotic contribution publicized by the press or, should they prefer, to remain anonymous.52

On the level of principle, the expropriation of bureaucrat-capital and other enemy assets reﬂected the state’s commitment to protect the private property of the people, on the one hand, and the state’s prerogative to seize private property to protect the economic interest and security of the people, on the other. If one seems to go against the other, then it is a tension that has characterized the modern conception of property all the way back to its liberal origins: all political orders that have embraced the principle of private property have also established conditions under which the state may deprive individuals of property.53

To be sure, in the nation-states born out of the American and French revolutions, the state appropriation of a citizen’s property without equivalence was presented as an exceptional act and was condemned as such by liberal critics. It was in the colonies that the exclusion of entire groups of people from the protection of ownership ﬁrst became a rule. With the world wars, the categorical dispossession of aliens made its way back to the metropole.54

In the Chinese case, liberal conceptions of property entered the scene together with the legal exceptionalism of colonialism and total warfare. Soon after Guomindang lawmakers promulgated the country’s ﬁrst Civil Code—which adopted the property system of Ger- man Civil Law without substantial changes—the Japanese began building a vast manufacturing belt on occupied land in the Northeast, relying on evictions and expropriation of

51 Xia, Down with Traitors, 83–85. 52 SHMA: B1-1-1855, 22-23 53 Gosewinkel, “Introduction: Histoire et fonctions de la propriété,” 11; and on the relationship between private property and state violence, Schwab, “Eigentum,” 94–103. 54 Caglioti, “Property Rights in Time of War.”

56 enemy nationals as a means of bringing land and capital under state control while simultaneously weakening local resistance.55 When Chinese forces expelled the occupiers, they considered the conﬁscation of property from the Japanese and collaborators as a form of postwar justice.56 Despite differences in ideology and context, it is thus possible to trace a line from the introduction of exceptional provisions to deal with bandits in the last days of the Qing dynasty, through the Guomindang’s emergency regulations for wartime collaborators, and ending with the Communist Party’s exclusion of bureaucrat-capitalists, landlords, reactionaries, and other enemies from the community of the people.57

There was never any doubt that Communist Party would act swiftly and decisively to seize assets from its enemies, whether the Guomindang government, bureaucrat-capitalists, or landlords. Far less certain was the extent to which it would honor the promises to protect the private economy and allow free enterprise under the period of New Democracy.

To alleviate some of the anxiety in the business community, Pan Hannian—a Communist agent who had developed ties to prominent capitalists as he moved between Shanghai,

Chongqing, and Hong Kong—made visits to the homes of leading industrialists in the week after the takeover of Shanghai and invited them for dinners at which he promised that the government would support management when it called the workers back to the factories.58

Collaboration with the national bourgeoisie was essential to the party’s plan to shift resources to promote rapid industrial development and thereby turn “consumer-cities” into

55 The Guomindang Civil Code of 1929–30 was based on drafts by the Qing government in the early days of the twentieth century. It fully incorporated the language of constitutional government and individual rights that the Communist Party later adopted. This watershed moment in Chinese legal history was nevertheless facilitated by the fact that the Qing legal practice had protected many civil rights, including entitlements like landownership and inheritance, in practice without bestowing upon them the same sacrality as the liberal doctrine of rights, see Huang, Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China, 53–57; close attention to the bifurcation of doctrine and practice, in Europe as well as in China, can help to avoid the reproduction of a stereotypical image of imperial property rights that has characterized the liberal tradition of legal thought, cf. Perdue, “Constructing Chinese Property Rights.” 56 Lary, China’s Civil War, 45–48. 57 Zhang, “Catégories judiciaires et pratiques d’exception: ”banditisme” et peine de mort en Chine”; Xia, Down with Traitors, 14–45. 58 Bergère, Capitalismes et capitalistes, 194. As reward for his work for the revolutionary underground, Pan Hannian was made deputy mayor of Shanghai in 1949, with responsibility for intelligence and United Front work. In 1955, however, Pan’s underground work made him a target upon the revelation that he had met with Wang Jingwei, the head of the collaborator government in Nanjing. Pan was convicted as a counterrevolutionary and died in the infamous Qincheng Prison in 1977; ﬁve years later the Party Center exonerated him from what it concluded were mistaken charges, see MLD: 1134

57 “producer-cities.”59 This task was most famously captured by Liu Shaoqi remarks during a visit to Tianjin in April–May 1949 that capitalists needed to continue their exploitation of workers for the time being for the sake of reducing unemployment and promoting production.60

Shortly thereafter, Mao instructed the conquerors of Shanghai to rally the city’s capitalists and engage them in the government of the city. In a telegram to the party officials and commanders responsible for taking Shanghai, he wrote on behalf of the Party Center: “Our opinion is that there will be great trouble if the takeover and administration of Shanghai were to proceed without the help of the liberal bourgeoisie [自由资产阶级 ziyou zichanjieji]; it will be difficult to stand up to the formidable combined forces of imperialism, bureaucrat- capitalism, and the Guomindang; and it will be difficult to isolate these enemy forces.”61

For these reasons, he advised them to consider whether it would be better to approach the capitalists even before the takeover of the city and, in any event, make sure to make plans for integrating the capitalists in the running of the city and report these back to the Party

Center.

In principle, the distinction between the national and the bureaucrat-bourgeoisie may have been sharp, but in practice there was no way to isolate the latter from the consequences of expropriation. Regular firms first became involved in the search for bureaucrat-capital when boards of directors were obliged to report suspected enemies among their shareholders under threat of punishment. When the focus of expropriation shifted from state industries to private companies the government had to define bureaucrat-capital so as to allow a selective confiscation that did not harm the other shareholders. The government was responsible for identifying bureaucrat-capital, while the identification of counterrevolutionaries and hanjian was a court matter. To facilitate identification, the Financial and Economic

59 Mao, “Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China,” 365. 60 Cultural Revolution allegations that Liu Shaoqi’s Tianjin speeches had represented a rightist “line” within the party seemed highly improbable even to contemporary scholars, Lieberthal, “Mao Versus Liu?”; recent scholarship only strengthen the earlier skepticism, cf. Brown, City Versus Countryside in Mao’s China, 20–21; Yang, “Dui zichanjieji zhengce de yanbian.” 61 Mao, “Zhuyi xishou ziyou zichanjieji daibiao canjia gongzuo.”

58 Affairs Committee deﬁned bureaucrat-capital as any assets belonging to the Four Big Fam-

ilies; listed war criminals and enemies guilty of serious wrongdoing (a category that cov-

ered the entire Guomindang leadership); local war criminals and tyrants; or undercover

agents and enemy organizations operating under false ﬂag.62 By 1952, the Shanghai gov-

ernment had seized assets in sixty-ﬁve industrial enterprises and one third of new credit went through the city’s ﬁrst public-private bank.63

1.4 … to public-private management

How to run otherwise national ﬁrms after the state had taken control over enemy shares?

The public-private joint management ﬁrm (公私合营企业 gong-si heying qiye) was the institu-

tional response to this question. It would prove to be the single-most important innovation

to come out of the campaign to expropriate enemy assets. Today, it is remembered as the

mechanism through which the government assimilated private ﬁrms in the campaign for

socialist transformation—a “halfway house toward full state ownership” in the words of

a recent survey of Chinese socialism.64 This amounts to a twenty-ﬁve percent downgrade when compared with Li Weihan’s 1955 estimation that the creation of public-private joint

management ﬁrms would take the country three-quarters of the way to socialism.65

Yet, when it was ﬁrst introduced nobody could have predicted the eventual signiﬁcance

of the public-private joint management ﬁrm. There was no expectation that this type of

ﬁrm would become a means for the state to assimilate private enterprise. On the contrary,

the stated rationale was to protect property rights of national shareholders following a state

takeover of enemy-owned assets. The People’s Daily presented the dilemma in the following

terms: on the one hand, if the government would take full control over ﬁrms that were only

62 Wu, “Guanliao ziben gainian ji moshou,” 55. 63 Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei tongzhanbu, Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiushi, and Shanghai shi dang’anguan, ZZGSYSG (Shanghai), Annex: Tables 2 and 6. 64 Walder, China Under Mao, 79. 65 The comment was made during a speech on the socialist transformation of the capitalist economy which was held in Beijing on November 23, 1955, see Zhonggong zhongyang dangshi ziliao zhengji weiyuanhui and Zhonggong zhongyang tongzhanbu, ZZGSYSG (Zhongyang), 950.

59 partly enemy-owned, then it would harm the rights of the other shareholders but, on the other, if the state had no say in how such companies were run then how would it be able to safeguard public interests?66 Public-private joint management was to be a compromise that would respect both private and public interests.

We do not have to take the Communist Party’s official mouthpiece at its word: the mod- erate growth of the public-private sector in the early 1950s is in itself sufficient evidence that the mixed ownership firm had not yet become a vehicle for socialist transformation.

The gross industrial output of the state sector, built from the confiscation of enemy assets, stood at 34.2 percent immediately after Communist takeover.67 It is true that the state share had risen significantly by 1953, but in the same period the total output of both private and individual enterprises more than doubled as the relative expansion of the state sector was due to a faster rate of growth rather than an outcome of the policy of expropriation.68 As for the creation of public-private joint management firms, the impact was relatively minor in terms of industrial output. Before 1953, such firms stood for only a few of percent of the gross output and had not reached more than sixteen percent on the eve of socialist transformation two years later.69 Shanghai did not depart significantly from this national trend, but the city’s private companies fared comparatively well and the state sector grew less quickly than on the national level.70

Only in the banking sector did public-private management serve to extend state control in the early 1950s. A series of consolidations involving state-owned and private lenders allowed state control over credit through ﬁve major public-private joint management banks; by the time of the First Five Year Plan in 1953, the ﬁve banks had turned into agents of

66 “Weishenme yao qingli qiye zhong de gonggu gongchan?” 为什么要清理企业中的公股公产？(Why do we have to sort out public stocks and public assets in ﬁrms?). People’s Daily, February 9, 1951, 2 67 This ﬁgure combines the output of state enterprises directly under national-level ministries and that of regional state enterprises, Zhonggong zhongyang dangshi ziliao zhengji weiyuanhui and Zhonggong zhongyang tongzhanbu, ZZGSYSG (Zhongyang), Table 33. 68 Bramall, Chinese Economic Development, 91. 69 Zhonggong zhongyang dangshi ziliao zhengji weiyuanhui and Zhonggong zhongyang tongzhanbu, ZZGSYSG (Zhongyang), Annex: Table 33. 70 Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei tongzhanbu, Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiushi, and Shanghai shi dang’anguan, ZZGSYSG (Shanghai), Annex: Table 2.

60 the central bank.71 Outside of the banking sector, state, party, and union extended their

inﬂuence within private enterprise through other means. Shanghai, for example, led the

improvement in revenue extraction by introducing new techniques of tax collection.72

No measure was more important to close the gap between the private and public sec-

tor than the state contracting system. In this framework, the state provided raw materials

to private ﬁrms that they would then process or it would place manufacturing orders for

the ﬁrms to fulﬁll. Although the system itself was not new—it had been deployed by the

Guomindang and, toward the end of the Civil War, by the Communist Party in its “eco-

nomic laboratory” in the Northeast—it took on unprecedented proportions in the effort to

speed up economic recovery after 1949 and ensure a steady stream of supplies to the Ko-

rean front.73 In Shanghai, the ratio of the industrial output that served the state contracting

system increased rapidly, surpassing ﬁfty percent in 1952 and reaching just short of eighty-

ﬁve percent on the eve of socialist transition three years later.74 The system was at its most

important in 1953 when the private industrial output produced on state contracts was val-

ued to over eight billion yuan, whereas the output of private industry outside of the system was worth ﬁve billion and public-private industry output a mere two billion.75 Naturally,

the system brought about a proliferation of connections between private businessmen and

public ofﬁcials. This in turn created opportunities for mutual enrichment that recalled the

bureaucrat-capitalism from the Communist propaganda against the old regime.76

In 1951, the Communist Party launched a nationwide crackdown on ofﬁcial corruption which mutated over the winter into a campaign targeting unlawful conduct in the private

sector. Thus, the Three Antis, as the initial part of the movement was called, turned into

the Five Antis, so called because the campaign focused on graft, tax evasion, theft of state

71 Hsiao, Money and Monetary Policy, 24–27. 72 Leighton, “Venture Communist,” 135. 73 Cliver, “Surviving Socialism,” 145; Li, Mao and the Economic Stalinization of China, 1948–1953, 75; So, “The Policy- Making and Political Economy of the Abolition of Private Ownership in the Early 1950s,” 694. 74 Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei tongzhanbu, Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiushi, and Shanghai shi dang’anguan, ZZGSYSG (Shanghai), Annex: Table 2. 75 Guojia gongshang xingzheng guanliju, Siying gongshangye tongji ziliao zhaibian, 25. 76 So, “The Policy-Making and Political Economy of the Abolition of Private Ownership in the Early 1950s,” 684– 85; see also Cliver, “Surviving Socialism.”

61 property, cheating on state contract and misuse of state-supplied materials and data. The campaign prompted a drastic update of the capitalist’s public persona. The contrast was especially sharp given that the national bourgeoisie had been lauded for supporting the troops in Korea the previous year, which had increased pressure on firms to buy government bonds. Now the same capitalists who had been called patriotic for manufacturing supplies for the troops faced accusations of cheating on army contracts.77 Encouraged by the antibourgeois rhetoric and with support from the authorities, union activists led teams of workers to search their bosses’ offices and homes for evidence of criminal activity. Thou- sands were detained and put before special courts where they faced astronomical fines, prison, and even the death penalty.78 In Shanghai, the courts fined hundreds of persons, sentenced dozens to prison, and even found a few deserving of the death penalty with or without reprieve.79

For all its brutality, the Five Antis brought about no lasting change in the Communist

Party’s representation of the bourgeoise nor did it alter the nature of the state’s relationship with the capitalist population. The image of the Janus-faced capitalist survived the antibourgeois propaganda of the campaign. In March 1952, Mao reprimanded the editors of the Central Propaganda Department’s periodical Study for a string of articles that had suggested that the bourgeoisie had lost its “dual character” and was now a wholly reactionary and corrupt class.80 At a convention of United Front ofﬁcials in June, Zhou Enlai criticized those who took the Five Antis as proof that the bourgeoisie had “swayed” away from their progressive side. Although the campaign had exposed reactionary and unlawful conduct, the Premier reminded his audience that many industrialists and merchants in the cities—a population he estimated at over two million when including family members—had proven

77 Huadong renmin chubanshe, Zichan jieji bufa fenzi, 56–60. 78 “Zhengwuyuan guanyu wufan yundong zhong chengli renmin fating de guiding” 政务院关于五反运动中成立人民法庭的规定 (The Government Administration Council rules concerning the establishment of People’s Tribunals during the Five Antis). MLC: G3, 119-124 79 Yang Kuisong cites statistics from a report kept in the Shanghai Municipal Archives (B13-2-287, 20-21) stating that there six death sentences with or without reprieve, six life sentences, and 180 prison sentences, Yang, “Shanghai wufan yundong shimo,” 30. 80 Zhonggong zhongyang, “Guanyu xuexi zazhi cuowu de jiantao.”

62 themselves willing to reform.81

On a more fundamental level, the Five Antis was identical to the earlier, less spectacu-

lar forms of extraction in that it never targeted capitalists directly but worked mainly on

the level of the ﬁrm.82 Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing, acknowledged as much when he

introduced the classiﬁcatory schema that the movement was based on. The schema ranked

ﬁrms by degree of law-abidingness, but as the mayor told his audience it made no distinc-

tion between “the bourgeoisie,” on the one hand, and “independent artisans of the petty

bourgeoisie and family-owned businesses,” on the other.83 The consequences of this lack

of distinction became obvious in Shanghai, where most of the seventy-three suicides re-

ported in connection with the movement were committed by small-scale business owners who hardly matched the mental image of the capitalist.84

In October 1952, the month when the Five Antis ofﬁcially concluded, Liu Shaoqi

headed a delegation to attend the Nineteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the

Soviet Union.85 In Moscow, Liu wrote a letter to Stalin containing the CCP Center’s

opinion on how China’s socialist transition should proceed. The letter predicted that in

ten years, the state share of the industrial sector would have reached ninety percent—an

optimistic but not incredible prediction given the state sector’s growth at the time—and

the remaining ten percent would be fully dependent on the state contracting system.86

At such a point, Liu wrote, the state could request that capitalists donate their factories

under assurances that they would still have a livelihood under socialism and—for owners who for some unspeciﬁed reason merited special consideration (有特殊情形者 you teshu

81 Zhou, “Guanyu Zhongguo de minzu zichanjieji wenti.” 82 Gao, The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou, 167. 83 “Beijing shi Peng Zhen shizhang san yue ba ri zai zhengwuyuan huiyi shang de baogao” 北京市彭真市长三月八日在政务院会议上的报告 (Mayor of Beijing Peng Zhen report at the Government Administration Council on March 8). MLC: G3, 119 84 Yang, “Shanghai wufan yundong shimo,” 10–11; when the Shanghai authorities declared that capitalists who confessed their crimes would enjoy protection and even invited them to weather out the campaign at the Peace Hotel, this protection only extended to a few hundred of the most prominent members of the business community, see Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei tongzhanbu, Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiushi, and Shanghai shi dang’anguan, ZZGSYSG (Shanghai), II:866. 85 Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi, Liu Shaoqi nianpu, pp. 304–5 86 Liu, “Guanyu Zhongguo zenyang cong xianzai zhubu guodu dao shehuizhuyi qu de wenti,” 1992.

63 qingxingzhe)—the state might even offer partial compensation to ease the transition.87

Rather than an exceptional measure, the compensation became general policy.

In the spring of 1953, Li Weihan led a large survey of the private economy in several major cities (including Nanjing, Wuhan, and Shanghai). Li was not just the director of the

CCP United Front Department from its creation to his fall from grace in 1964, and therefore the leading ofﬁcial in charge of the party’s policy toward the national bourgeoise, but one of China’s most senior economic cadres: he was made vice director of the Government

Administration Council’s Financial and Economic Affairs Committee in November 1953 and then—following the reorganization and renaming of the chief government agency in

1954—director of the State Council’s Eighth Office. Summarizing his findings in two reports to Mao and other central leaders, he described private firms as having become an obstacle to the development of the productive forces: they had grown inefficient, disorganized, and wasteful.88 In particular, he pointed to the Five Antis as having undermined the authority of private management and left capitalists worrying about the future—an assertion that made light of official efforts to restore workplace discipline following the movement.89 Whatever the underlying reason for the private sector’s sorry state, he believed that the situation called for a rapid increase of state control and consolidation. If he was pessimistic about the private sector, he was far more optimistic about the public-private joint management firms, which he lauded as the most advanced and efficient mode of state capitalism.90

Li Weihan proposed two changes to remake the joint management firms into vehicles of socialist transition.91 First, the state-appointed director of the firm was to have the final say in all matters and that the private-side would be reduced to a consultative role. Second, the private-side should be paid a dividend to compensate for this loss of control and income.

This rate would be ﬁxed at a rate slightly higher than that of a bank savings account with all

87 Liu, 368. 88 One of the reports has been partially reprinted in Li, “Guanyu ziben zhuyi gongye zhong de gong-si guanxi wenti de baogao”; the other, which focused on managerial problems, remains unavailable, see So, “The Policy- Making and Political Economy of the Abolition of Private Ownership in the Early 1950s,” 699. 89 Cf. Frazier, The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace, 125–31. 90 Li, “Guanyu ziben zhuyi gongye zhong de gong-si guanxi wenti de baogao.” 91 So, “The Policy-Making and Political Economy of the Abolition of Private Ownership in the Early 1950s,” 700.

64 additional proﬁts going to the state. With Li’s changes, the public-private joint management

ﬁrm would remain jointly run in name only, as the state would have power over operational and personnel decisions and, crucially, the return on investments would be completely cut from the performance of the ﬁrm. Both of Li’s suggestions were adopted in principle as the

Communist Party moved to accelerate socialist transition.

On the People’s Republic’s fourth anniversary, the People’s Daily published an editorial that celebrated the country’s economic recovery and introduced what was called the Gen- eral Line for the Transitional Period. What was the General Line? The editorial repeated the response given at a meeting of the CPPCC the previous day: the goal was to realize

“over a relatively long period of time” socialist industrialization and the socialist transformation of the economy.92 When in Moscow in late late 1952, Liu Shaoqi estimated that this period should be about ten years. The following year, on the basis of Li Weihan’s report,

Mao gave a rough outline of the General Line and remarked that it would take ten to ﬁfteen years or even “a little longer” for China to basically complete its socialist transition.93 This period referred to the time required to reach a high level of industrialization and carry out the nationalization of agriculture, handicraft industries, and capitalist enterprises. In his remarks at the meeting, Li Weihan reiterated that in the new public-private joint management

ﬁrms the “socialist component” would take the leading role.94 At a meeting of the FIC later that year, Li assured delegates from the business community that the private sector was still vital and that socialist transition would be “gradual” and “not sudden.”95 Even so, the adoption of the General Line made of the public-private joint management, an organization form conceived for the operation of companies in which the government had taken control of enemy shares, into an instrument of socialist transformation.

92 “Weizhe shehuizhuyi gongyehua de yuanda mubiao er fendou” 为着社会主义工业化的远大目标而奋斗 (Striving toward the great goal of socialist industrialization), People’s Daily, October 1, 1953, 1 93 Mao, “Refute Right Deviationist Views That Depart from the General Line,” 93. 94 Quoted in Feng, “Rushing Toward Socialism,” 244. 95 “Zai Zhonghua quanguo gongshangye lianhehui huiyuan daibiao dahui shang Li Weihan baogao guojia zong luxian he guojia zibenzhuyi deng wenti” 在中华全国工商业联合会会员代表大会上李维汉报告国家总路线和国家资本主义等问题 (Li Weihan reports on the nation’s general line, state capitalism, and other issues at a conference of representatives from the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce), People’s Daily, October 28, 1953, 1

65 1.5 The signiﬁcance of “painless delivery”

The Communists named their plan to compensate capitalists the Redemption Policy (赎

买政策 shumai zhengce). Both the policy’s name and its ideological justiﬁcation stemmed from a single line on Entschädigung (compensation, redemption) in Engels’ 1894 essay on the peasant question. Here, Engels channeled the voice of a friend who had been dead for over a decade to defend the idea that the workers’ party, once it had come to power, might choose to pay off landowners engaged in capitalist production: “We by no means consider compensation as impermissible in any event; Marx told me (and how many times!) that, in his opinion, we would get off cheapest if we could buy out the whole lot of them.”96

Marx pronouncement from beyond the grave concerned a future in which Communists had seized power; a scenario that remained hypothetical at the time.

No sooner had the Russian Revolution made this scenario a reality,than its leader turned to the question of compensation. For Lenin, compensation was a means to split the bourgeoisie into two camps: the new government would reward the allegiance of “cultured” capitalists with one hand while violently suppressing the “uncultured” capitalists with the other. In his 1918 rebuttal to the “left communists,” he warned that the path from capitalism to socialism would be painful and difﬁcult and, with reference to Engels, proposed that compensation could be a means to ease the transition. He wrote: “the method of compromise, or of buying off the cultured capitalists who agree to ‘state capitalism,’ who are capable of putting it into practice and who are useful to the proletariat as intelligent and experienced organisers of the largest types of enterprises, which actually supply products to tens of millions of people.”97 The same passage appeared in “Tax in Kind” which, as mentioned above, became one of the key texts for the Chinese Communist Party’s economic affairs.

There was a straight line from Lenin’s division of the Russian bourgeoisie into a “cultured” and an “uncultured” segment and the Chinese segregation of “bureaucratic” and

“national” capitalists. The Chinese Communist Party saw an opportunity to realize the

96 Engels, “The Peasant Question in France and Germany,” 500. 97 Lenin, “Left-Wing Childishness,” 345.

66 peaceful transition to socialism that had alluded Lenin. In a 1954 review of the conditions

for socialist transition, the Ministry of Commerce summed up the Soviet experience in a

few lines:

[T]he Russian bourgeoisie did not accept or comply with state “regulation” and

“supervision,” but instead questioned the existence of the Soviet government

itself and attempted to wage a war to overthrow the Soviet government with

the help of international imperialism, [thereby] rendering unlikely Lenin’s pro-

posed method of gradual transition. As a result, the Soviet government had but

to use the extreme method of “Red Guards Attacking Capital” to expropriate

the bourgeoise, and ﬁnally the crushing of the [the bourgeoisie’s] military resis-

tance became the basis for the 1921 turn to New Economic Policy; the existing

strategy of “taking by storm” once again transformed into a longterm “siege”

strategy.98

The Ministry not only characterized the expropriation during the civil war in Russia as

extreme but suggested that a peaceful transition was always preferable should the circum-

stances allow. There were good reasons to believe that the Chinese situation would be more

favorable to a conciliatory approach. It was the breakout of the civil war that had caused

Lenin to abandon the initial plan for transition in favor of the militarization of the economy,

expropriation of private business and industry and the forced requisition of grain to meet

the demands of war communism. As for China, the civil war was on an indeﬁnite hiatus

since the Guomindang had left the mainland. This partition of China and the emerging po-

sitions of the Cold War had led the Communist Party to transform the United Front from a

temporary strategy into a permanent institution. Through the Two Associations, capitalists

enjoyed a form of institutional representation and, more importantly, protection from the violence of mass movements.

Once the Communist Party had settled on the Redemption Policy, it was time to con-

98 Shangyebu, “Shangyebu guanyu dui zibenzhuyi gongshangye de shehuizhuyi gaizao gongzuo de baogao,” 142.

67 vince the capitalists that the new line was in their best interest and that they had nothing to fear from socialism. In his letter to Stalin, Liu Shaoqi had written that the Chinese bourgeoisie was unlikely to oppose socialist transition. Now, the Communist Party began the propaganda push that would make sure that this turned out to be true.99

In the early months of 1954, Huang Yanpei left for Shanghai to propagate the new line.

Huang was the most likely candidate to sell the party’s new line in the city that harbored the country’s most important capitalist population. During the war against Japan, Huang had become a vocal advocate of unity between the Guomindang and the Communist Party, met with Mao in Yan’an, and founded the Chinese Democratic National Construction As- sociation.100 Minjian, as the association was called for short, grew out of weekly gatherings of prominent businesspeople, which led the Communist Party to treat it as representative of the national bourgeoisie.

In Shanghai, Huang shared his vision of how a peaceful transition into another mode of production would look like. The loss of property that came with the transition to socialism did not have to be traumatic, Huang claimed, but would ideally resemble a “painless delivery” (无痛分娩法 wutong fenmianfa) on the political level. In order for their socialist rebirth to be free of suffering, the capitalists had only to stop resisting, fulfill their patriotic obligations, and put their trust in the party.101 Huang had borrowed the childbirth metaphor from an ongoing women’s health campaign to promote the benefits of the Psychoprophy- lactic Painless Delivery Method. Much like socialism, this medical procedure came with the promise of a modern and scientific solution to the agony of labor.102 As he was preparing his Shanghai visit, Huang had secured permission to use the analogy during a private audience with Zhou Enlai, the premier, and Li Weihan, head of the United Front. They had agreed, but the Premier had added one caveat: the level of discomfort would depend on

99 Zhonggong zhongyang dangshi ziliao zhengji weiyuanhui and Zhonggong zhongyang tongzhanbu, ZZGSYSG (Zhongyang), 661. 100 On Huang Yanpei’s political activism during the war, see Curran, “From Educator to Politician.” 101 SHMA: C47-2-32, 81-83 102 Ahn, “Reinventing Scientiﬁc Medicine for the Socialist Republic.”

68 the capitalists’ aptitude at transforming their exploitative mentality.103

As socialist transition picked up speed, the analogy of painless delivery disappeared in

a cascade of images of release, rebirth, and rejoicing. In Shanghai, like in other cities, tens

of thousands marched through the streets to the beating of drums and accompanied by lion

dancers. The shops along Nanjing Road publicized their reorganization by putting up signs

in the windows with the character used for weddings: public-private joint management was to be a marriage of corporation and state. At night, ﬁreworks and neon lights spelling

out “Celebrate Public-Private Joint Management Across the City” lit up the dark sky, at

least if we are to believe one of the most remarkable propaganda ﬁlms of the time, Tang

Xiaodan’s City Without Night (Jiangnan Film Studio, 1957). The ﬁlm ends with the ﬁlm’s

protagonist—a capitalist who the viewer has seen vacillate between love for his country and

callous proﬁt-seeking—join together with workers in dance and music to celebrate through

the illuminated night.104 Just as bright shone the night in the nearby city of Hangzhou in

the woodcut depiction of a local artist (Figure 1.3).

A more somber reality appeared through Huang Yanpei’s personal correspondence with

Mao. In one of many letters between the two, Mao politely but ﬁrmly reproached Huang

for going too far in his effort to reassure Shanghai’s capitalists. From a lakeshore villa in

Hangzhou, Mao wrote that the childbirth analogy was ill-conceived because “those people who are not very enlightened may after all experience some pain.”105 It is easy to think that

the dreamlike visions of the party’s outward propaganda were a lie covering up the truth

revealed in private communication. But such a hypothesis depends on two assumptions:

one being the presumption that party propaganda, in the sense of all communication be-

tween the party and its outside, was always a matter of persuasion and the other being the

conspiracist fallacy that secrecy equals truth. Without such assumptions, the propaganda

can be interpreted as a promise: as long as business owners comported themselves as the

103 SHMA: C47-2-32, 81 104 For a detailed analysis of the ﬁlm’s themes, production, and reception, see Leighton, “Capitalists, Cadres, and Culture,” 189–209. 105 Mao, “Guanyu shenyue Huang Yanpei zai Shanghai gongshangjie de jianghuagao de xin,” 468.

69 Figure 1.3: “A Night to Rejoice,” Hangzhou, 1956

70 exemplary capitalists shown on the silver screen and paintings they could expect socialist

transition to be smooth. If not, they would be confronted with the naked coercion that was

the alternative to the shared ﬁction of propaganda. They would, as Mao put it, “experience

some pain.”

How did Chinese business owners react to the prospect of giving up their property?

Reports from Shanghai suggested that initial reactions to the General Line were mixed:

owners of businesses that were doing well were reluctant to hand over their companies while those who ran companies in trouble welcomed public-private joint management.106

Some historians argue that the conditions for private enterprise were already so poor by

the mid-1950s that many entrepreneurs considered public-private joint management as an

escape from a position that had become both economically unproﬁtable and politically un-

tenable.107 According to this view, the gradual increase of controls on the private sector and

hostile attitudes toward private enterprise, which came to the fore in the Five Antis, explain why socialist transition encountered relatively little resistance.108 Against this interpreta-

tion, Feng Xiaocai contends that the Communist Party’s sudden change of strategy—from

postwar reconstruction and gradual extension of state controls to a policy of accelerated so-

cialist transformation—required a signiﬁcant degree of coercion.109 In Feng’s opinion, the

momentum of the party’s turnabout places a heavy burden of proof on any historian sug-

gesting that Chinese businesspeople voluntarily accepted—enthusiastically or resignedly—

socialist transformation. In particular, he is unconvinced by the proposition that the atti-

tudes of Chinese capitalists changed over time to become more amenable to the idea of

giving up their businesses. “Generally,” he notes, “people place an extremely high value

106 Zhao, “A Helpless Choice,” 267–8. 107 This line of reasoning can be split up into two basic position: one argues that the Communist Party adopted a strategy of “euthanasia,” to borrow Chen Yongfa’s term, which progressively worsened conditions for private business to the point where entrepreneurs had little choice but to surrender their ﬁrms, e.g. Chen, Zhongguo gongchan geming qishi nian, 605–41; and also Kwan, “Janus-Faced Capitalism”; Sheehan, “Shotgun Wedding”; the other suggests that the acceleration of the timeline for socialist transition was the state’s response to a variety of more or less unexpected problems in the private economy, e.g. So, “The Policy-Making and Political Economy of the Abolition of Private Ownership in the Early 1950s”; Cliver, “Surviving Socialism.” 108 Yang, “Shanghai wufan yundong shimo.” 109 Feng, “Rushing Toward Socialism”; see also Feng, “Zhengzhi shengcun yu jingji shengcun.”

71 on their private property.”110

1.6 Rights and rightists in socialist transition

Although sentiments among capitalists surely varied, Feng Xiaocai’s assertion seems reasonable by and large. Many surely experienced the loss of control and security that accompanied expropriation as transgression or even a form of violence. Liu Nianzhi, to take just one example, was unhappy. The son of the same “Matchstick King” who had once worried that he would not qualify as a national capitalist felt anxious about his own future. Denied even the use of the company stamp, he wondered if he would be left idle, without any say in how the family business should be run.111 For China’s wealthiest industrialists, property had been a bulwark of the family’s autonomy but also provided a sense of purpose. Of course, for the Communists, this same quality supplied the fundamental justiﬁcation for abolishing private property: the freedom of a select few came at the expense of the alien- ated masses who possessed nothing but their labor power. To end this injustice, they would not just expropriate the expropriators but abolish the institution of private property.

The social and even psychological effects of dispossession depends on variations in method and circumstance. As the loss of property is accompanied by the loss of autonomy, the act of dispossession is often accompanied by forms of othering, even dehuman- ization, and as such it has come to be recognized as a portent of the expulsion or even the extermination of people. The administrative expropriation of bureaucrat-capital, court- ordered seizure of counterrevolutionaries’ belongings, and redistribution of the landlords’ plots were all linked to forms of exclusion. The creation of joint public-private enterprises, by contrast, included capitalists in the state system. In the ideal, this act of dispossession would eliminate inequalities and curtail the potential for self-sufﬁciency and as such be the necessary ﬁrst step in a process of assimilation. In actual practice, the state policy of compensating capitalists was a recognition of a form of entitlement emanating from this

110 Feng, “Rushing Toward Socialism,” 241. 111 Zhao, “A Helpless Choice,” 281.

72 population’s inclusion in the political community.

Questions of inclusion and entitlement deﬁned the “high tide of socialist transition” of

1956. The steady decline of the private economy relative to state industries in the early 1950s was followed by an abrupt end to private industry and commerce as the decade passed its

midpoint. At the close of the Sixth Plenum of the Seventh CCP Central Committee in Oc-

tober 1955, a belligerent Mao raved about the need to deprive the bourgeoisie of its last

“tiny bit” of freedom and “obliterate [capitalism] from the face of the earth.”112 A year

later, non-state industries’ share of the country’s gross industrial output had fallen from

one quarter to just over one percent.113 In the “high tide,” the authorities abandoned the

earlier mode of operation—which had relied on pilot sites and the evaluation of individual

ﬁrms’ suitability for public-private joint management, leaving out smaller companies—in

favor of transforming entire industries at once. In Shanghai, private ﬁrms scurried to com-

plete their applications for joint management in just a few days and tens of thousands of

cadres organized into work groups to complete transition on schedule.114 Following the

applications for joint management came applications from some two hundred thousand

business owners and managers, in Shanghai alone, who found themselves in need of a

job.115 The so-called capital-side personnel (资方人员 zifang renyuan also known as “private-

side personnel” 私方人员 sifang renyuan) was a motley crew consisting of major investors

and minor shareholders, managers and sole proprietors, owners of street-side stores and

owners of factory compounds, employers who had thousands of workers on their payrolls

and self-employed artisans who lacked the means to keep any permanent staff.

In the month of the Sixth Plenum, Mao met with representatives of the Two Associa-

tions to remind them to take the lead as the assimilation of private ﬁrms into state enter-

prises picked up speed. He expected them to act as models to be emulated by the business

112 Mao, “The Debate on the Co-Operative Transformation of Agriculture and the Current Class Struggle,” 214, 224. 113 Guojia tongjiju, Zhongguo tongji nianjian, 214–15. 114 Feng, “Rushing Toward Socialism,” 252. 115 Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei tongzhanbu, Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiushi, and Shanghai shi dang’anguan, ZZGSYSG (Shanghai), Table 10.

73 community. In exchange for this cooperation, Mao once again assured them that the state would provide capitalists with meaningful employment.116

The fate of capital-side personnel after the creation of public-private joint management

firms varied as much as their backgrounds. A considerable number were employed as accountants and engineers to meet the constant demand for financial literacy and technical expertise. Others were placed in management positions on the shop floor or even as vice-directors of major enterprises. Only the chief executive positions were out of reach for capital-side personnel as these were reserved for the public side and consequently manned by party officials. One fifth of former directors and managers in Shanghai’s industrial sector retained senior management positions and one third stayed on as factory bosses.117 Outside of the industry, the party valued the expertise of capitalists at a far lower rate. Not even two percent of the 25,000 capital-side employees in the city’s commercial companies and food and services were given upper management positions and about twelve percent were set to manage district-level stores.118 However, high-ranking members of the Two Associations saw their responsibilities increase as they received positions in the local or even the central government.

On February 8, 1956, the State Council took a decision on the form of compensation to which shareholders and proprietors would be entitled in exchange for state control over their assets. After an extended drafting process with input not only from authorities on economic policy but also from the heads of United Front work, this decision introduced the fixed-rate dividend (定息 dingxi) as the universal form of compensation offered to capitalists.119 In terms of bureaucratic rationalization, the fixed-rate dividend was an improvement upon the earlier system of payments which had divided company profits into four:

116 Mao, “Gongshangyezhe yao zhangwo ziji de mingyun.” 117 Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei tongzhanbu, Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiushi, and Shanghai shi dang’anguan, ZZGSYSG (Shanghai), Table 10a. 118 Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei tongzhanbu, Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiushi, and Shanghai shi dang’anguan, Table 10c. 119 The draft to the Decision on Putting into Effect Measures for Fixed-Rate Dividends in Public-Private Joint Man- agement Firms was discussed by the provincial heads of United Front departments, the CCP Central Leading Group of Ten for the Transformation of Industry and Commerce and ﬁnally, in late January 1956, by the Polit- buro, see Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi, Chen Yun nianpu, 423–4

74 thirty percent going to the state, another thirty to the company reserve fund, ﬁfteen to worker welfare funds, and twenty-ﬁve to private shareholders.120

The true signiﬁcance of the new form of compensation was that it cut all links between

the capitalists’ income and company performance. Had the capitalists payout remained

pegged to the proﬁtability of public-private joint management, they had been in a position

not just to continue their exploitation but to beneﬁt from the state extraction of resources

from the countryside to ﬁnance industrial development; with the prices of produce kept

low, industrial enterprises could pay low wages and increase the margins on producer

goods.121 The decision to ﬁx compensation as a percentage of the state-set price of the cap-

italists’ assets ensured that future proﬁts would be absorbed by the state.

Scholars have pointed out that business owners were pressured to accept state valua-

tions of their companies that fell far short of anything that might qualify as a “fair” price.

The criticism is not new—objections appeared as soon as the State Council’s decision was

translated into action. In Shanghai, the municipal government began implementation in

April, following months of preparation. Local draft measures drew criticism for allowing

a range between one and six percent for the yearly payouts of dividends.122 Each sector would be allowed to set its own rates within this range and could lower or raise these for

individual companies as a form of incitement. The fact that these rates would favor indus-

tries with a higher concentration of capital, reﬂecting a longstanding political preference for

heavy industry, appeared particularly unfair. If made permanent, such measures would

have been biased to the beneﬁt of capitalists with substantial assets and thus exacerbated

the stratiﬁcation of a group whose members ranged from self-employed artisans and shop-

keepers on the one extreme to the patriarchs of industrial family empires on the other. In

July, the Party Center responded by setting the dividends at a ﬂat rate of ﬁve percent per an-

num for all recipients.123 The political leadership accepted that government policy should

120 Liu, “Shanghai shi gongsi heying qiye dingxi yanjiu,” 54. 121 Bramall, Chinese Economic Development, 247; Riskin, China’s Political Economy, 242–8. 122 Liu, “Shanghai shi gongsi heying qiye dingxi yanjiu,” 56. 123 Zhonggong zhongyang, “Guanyu gongsi heying qiye dingxi banfa de ruogan zhishi.”

75 not be designed to beneﬁt the wealthiest capitalists, but did not consider it the business of the socialist state to reduce inequalities either. The result was a heavily stratiﬁed population collectively labelled “capitalist.”

The end of private enterprise roughly coincided with the Hundred Flowers movement when the Communist Party encouraged members of the people to openly express their opinions about the party and the political system. Former business owners answered the calls to

“let a hundred ﬂowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend” by voicing their concerns about dividend payments, their class status, and their future within the socialist system. On January 8, 1957, the industrialist Li Kangnian submitted to Shanghai’s People’s

Assembly the first out of three proposals related to fixed-rate interest rates. His argument was straightforward: assuming an interest rate fixed at five percent it would take twenty years before former owners of private firms had been fully compensated.124 This was far longer than the tentative announcement the year before that dividend payments would come to a halt in seven years. Li’s proposal found itself into the People’s Daily and became the subject of controversy until the Anti-Rightist campaign put an end to the discussion and

Li was removed from all his positions as a “rightist.” For reasons that had nothing to do with Li’s objection, the government decided to prolong dividends for another four years in

1962 (see Chapter 3).

Controversies around dividend rates or the length of the period of payments presumed that capitalists were entitled to compensation for their loss of property. But what was the source of this entitlement? It might be tempting to search for it among fundamental state principles. The Common Program’s guaranteed protection of the “economic interests and private property” of all the classes of the people had been replaced by Article 10 in the 1954

Constitution: “The state protects according to law the right of capitalists to own means of production and other capital.” Still, the state reserved the right to “acquire” (征购 zheng- gou), “expropriate” (征用 zhengyong) or “nationalize” (收归国有 shougui guoyou) the means of production in the interest of the public (Article 13). More to the point, neither the Com-

124 Xiao-Planes, “Buy 20 Years.”

76 mon Program nor the Constitution actually served to constrain state action or to protect

the rights of the people in any systematic fashion. For this reason, there is an argument for

shifting attention away from legal documents and formal rights to the formation of rights

consciousness through the propagation and discussion of these documents.125 The reason-

ing around the source of the capitalists’ entitlement, among the more controversial of the

constitutional rights, is a particularly interesting case.

A particularly well-informed exchange on the right to dividends took place in the pages

of the country’s two leading legal journals, Legal Science and Political-Legal Research, over

the course of the Hundred Flowers movement. In the words of Cao Jie, an esteemed Repub-

lican jurist who had become one of the most senior legal ofﬁcials of the People’s Republic,

“‘Dividends’ are the capitalist’s revenue from exploitation, because ‘dividends’ still exist,

a remnant form of the capitalist system of ownership still exists.”126 In as much, Cao was

in agreement with the other participants in this learned discussion. He also agreed that the

time had come to correct for a singular focus on the economic “base” in early discussions

of the Redemption Policy, at the cost of ignoring completely questions relating to the legal

“superstructure.” In September 1956, Chen Yun had commented that “the right to property

has not been completely abolished” and that this was why the state continued to pay divi-

dends. On the basis of this comment from the Communist Party’s top economic cadre, some

jurists came to believe that the right to ownership codiﬁed by the 1954 Constitution was still

relevant. Cao Jie did not agree. In his mind, two basic facts invalidated this interpretation:

first, the socialist side was firmly in control of public-private joint management firms and,

second, the dividends could not be transferred. The restrictions on the capitalist’s authority within the ﬁrm and on the disposal of payments, he argued, clearly showed that the right to

dividends did not meet the legal deﬁnition of ownership (所有权 suoyouquan). In economic

terms, the dividends were a “remnant” of the capitalist “system of ownership” which had

now been replaced. This was expressed in the terms of the legal superstructure as the right

125 Diamant and Feng, “The PRC’s First National Critique.” 126 Cao, “Guanyu ’dingxi’ zai falü shang de xingzhi wenti de yijian,” 37.

77 to dividends as a mere “remnant” of the bundle of rights that had previously come together in private ownership. Cao referred to this narrow entitlement as the “right to request payment” (支付请求权 zhifu qingqiu quan).127 The term indicates the source of this entitlement: the State Council’s decision on dividend payments.

The source of the “right to request payment” was a state decision which was in itself contingent on the admission of capitalists into the political community of socialism. If there was any meaning behind that mysterious quality that Lenin had called “culture,” Mao referred to as “enlightenment,” and Liu Shaoqi termed “foresight” it was the ability to recognize that entitlement was contingent on membership and not on any right which transcended the rules by which the community was organized. If there was any substance behind the charges that Li Kangnian and those who took his side were rightists, beyond the mere fact that they had dared to voice criticism against the government, it was that they presented the dividends in the terms of a contract between state and the former owners. This line of thinking was shared by those jurists who proposed that the socialist state was still obligated to honor the private ownership. An enlightened capitalist, by contrast, would have understood that what separated the idea of compensation as a privilege of peoplehood from the notion that ownership was an inalienable right was nothing less than the distinction between socialist legality and bourgeois rights. Enlightened or not, the capitalists were in need of a place within the socialist system.

127 Cao, 38.

78 2 Working through exploitation

The previous chapter was concerned with the discrete effects of dispossession on the politi-

cal community before and during socialist transition. Without speculating as to the various

degrees of “pain” experienced by those affected by the Redemption Policy, it was proposed

that this mode of dispossession constituted a necessary condition for capitalists’ integra-

tion as China moved into socialism: no ﬁeld of action remained for former managers and

shareholders except for in the service of the state. As a consequence, the creation of public-

private joint management ﬁrms collapsed any lingering separation between the economic

and political organization of society and, in so doing, made it so that any decision on a

capitalist’s position within the hierarchy of the workplace was a reﬂection of their standing within a corresponding moral community, what we might call the socialist community of

production. What place would the capitalists occupy within this community? This ques-

tion became more relevant than ever once the Communist Party put its plan for socialist

transition into action.

As the springtime push to merge private companies, sector by sector, into public-private

joint management ﬁrms winded down in the summer, Xu Dixin, who we now recognize as

one of the party’s foremost experts on the bourgeoisie, gave his well-informed opinion on

how the party should approach the capitalist question under the new circumstances.1 In

the previous months, Xu had been personally involved in drafting policies on the capital-

ists’ job placement, sick leave, and the state appreciation of capital assets.2 On August 7,

1 ECNU: As 0351-141-042, 2 2 Xue, Aoshuangji.

79 1956, he stood before an audience of cadres gathered for the State Council and All-China

Federation of Trade Unions joint conference on salaries in public-private joint management

firms. He began his address by framing the capitalist problem in terms of efficiency: how should the state make use of the capitalists to maximize benefit to socialist construction?

The capitalists, in other words, constituted a resource of particular value to the government and its people.

In order to properly exploit this resource, Xu argued, the state would have to account for its unique qualities. This entailed, first and foremost, recognizing that capitalists belonged to a class that had been tempered by its arduous past. From its emergence, China’s national bourgeoisie had found itself pincered between the combined forces of imperialism and bureaucrat-capitalism. In order to stay competitive in such a hostile environment, the capitalists had developed a technical and managerial expertise that had benefited—and could still benefit—the nation as a whole. Xu estimated, without stating on what basis he made his assessment, that about eighty percent of the bourgeoisie had acquired skills that would remain useful even after socialist transition and only a tiny minority consisted of

“utterly useless capitalists who did not understand anything.”3

Xu was not the first to propose that the state would do well to put bourgeois shoulders to the wheel. A few months earlier, Chen Yun, the party’s foremost authority on financial and economic affairs, had suggested that it was better to think of capitalists as “assets” rather than “burdens.”4 Even before that, Mao himself had objected to the simplistic view according to which the capitalists’ profit-seeking mentality was entirely a bad thing. Instead, he had proposed that the “profit” (利 li) that so enchanted the capitalists could be broken down into three basic components: national profit, workers’ profit, and the capitalists’ private profit.5 If the drive to generate profit was in fact so strong in the bourgeois mind, the state would be foolish not to exploit this power source while redirecting its output toward

3 ECNU: As 0351-141-042, 2 4 Chen, “Dui quanguo siying gongshangye gaizao huibao huiyi de zongjie,” 536. 5 From the record of Mao Zedong’s conversation with Huang Yanpei during the Five Antis, Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi, Mao Zedong nianpu, 519–521

80 national development and socialist construction.

It is when Xu’s speech leaves commonplace references to utility behind that it becomes truly interesting. As Xu elaborated on what he thought a future policy toward the national bourgeoisie should look like, he chose to speak of capitalists not only as a resource to be exploited or as machines propelled by the demand for proﬁt, but to cast their distinctiveness in more human terms. The national bourgeoisie, he said, had its own sense of de 德 (virtue, moral character) and if the party was to put the capitalists to good use, it would have to account for this speciﬁcity: “The question should be seen as this: if capitalists are patriotic, accept transformation, work energetically and so on, then this can be regarded as their ‘de,’ it would be inappropriate to use the standards of a Communist Party member to assess them.”6

Of course, the idea that virtue was class-speciﬁc was not a new idea. In the mid-1840s,

Marx and Engels had argued that the ruling class was able to uphold its dominance because their own values found ideal and seemingly universal expression in religion, laws, and social mores.7 A century later in Yan’an, Liu Shaoqi had picked up this theme when he ridiculed the idea of a universal morality that transcended class divisions. This was “decep- tive nonsense,” he contended, as the so-called ethics were in fact “built upon the basis of safeguarding the interests of a small number of exploiters.”8 In place of a universal morality, Liu proposed a set of virtues that owed their superiority to their particularity: “Our ethics [道德 daode] are great precisely because they are the ethics of Communism and of the proletariat.”9 In the Marxian conception, a morality in service of the proletariat’s speciﬁc interests would, ultimately, favor all as only the particular struggle of the working class could bring about the emancipation of mankind as a whole.10

6 ECNU: As 0351-141-042, 6 7 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology 8 Liu, How to Be a Good Communist, 1951, 58 9 Liu, 57 10 The surface universality of the liberal ethos and bourgeois legality, on the basis of a commitment to punish equally any individual transgressing the established norms, served only to conceal the perpetuation of wrongdoing toward an entire class of people, as argued by Marx in Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, the introduction to which was translated by the CCP Central Compilation and Translation Bureau in 1956 as part of its ongoing work to produce a Chinese edition of the Marx-Engels Collected Works

81 Xu’s modest contribution was to bring out the implications of this line of thought for the party’s policy toward the bourgeoisie. As long as the party maintained that there was such a class within Chinese society, and that class society therefore persisted in some remnant form, it could only measure capitalists against the distinct standards of ethical conduct belonging to their class and not against those it applied to the progressive classes or the vanguard party. To each class belonged not only its own morality, but also a standard by which to evaluate the actions of its members.

There was a difference in kind between capitalists, workers, and party members and socialism could accommodate and even exploit such diversity. This is how we may understand Xu’s proposition that the capitalists were set apart by a unique set of skills and virtues as well as his policy recommendations. From this outlook followed a set of policy prefer- ences. Although Xu admitted that there were jobs for which capitalists were not suited, he rejected wholeheartedly the idea that they should therefore be stripped of all responsibilities. Nobody would beneﬁt from a situation where capitalists were inactive, left to “drink hot water and sing Beijing operas while grumbling behind our backs.”11 Xu thus defended the principle that all political action toward the capitalist population had to be guided by the historical distinctiveness of bourgeois identity, until such time that this class had been fully eradicated as its members transformed (改造 gaizao) themselves into toilers. In the mean- time, the party had to strike a balance between making full use (利用 liyong) of their skills and expertise while conﬁning (限制 xianzhi) the capitalists’ reactionary tendencies.

Xu spoke of the standards by which to evaluate bourgeois conduct, but he never addressed the standards by which to determine capitalist identity. What preoccupied him were the collective characteristics of the bourgeoisie as a class rather than practical questions of determining the relation between the class and its members. Like Mao Zedong and

Chen Yun, he reﬂected on what made the capitalists different and how that difference could be exploited, but paid no attention to the act on which any bureaucratic action toward the capitalist population would have to be premised: the formal identiﬁcation of capitalists on

11 ECNU: As 0351-141-042, 6

82 an individual level.

2.1 What place for cotton traders in the system of production?

At once a social category and an administrative-legal status, class shared certain features with nationality and citizenship. Like citizenship, class status was an institution that sep-

arated members from aliens. In this context, the aliens were the class enemies, excluded

from the category of the people and stripped of both rights and possessions. But unlike

citizenship, class status was not a binary. In the case of the capitalists, we are dealing with

persons who were not quite full members, but not aliens either. Capitalists were not part

of the toiling masses, but neither did the state count them to the class enemies and sub-

ject them to comparable forms of exclusion. In this sense, the persistence of capitalist class

status and the liminal identity to which it corresponded presents a serious challenges to

recent interpretations of Maoist politics as determined to an extraordinary degree by the

friend-enemy distinction.12

Class, as a state category, could be broken down into two markers that individuals were

expected to report in their dealings with the bureaucracy. Most ofﬁcial forms contained—

next to ﬁelds for name, sex, birthplace, age, ethnicity, and level of education—one ﬁeld

for “family [class] origin” (家庭出身 jiating chushen) or “individual [class] status” (本人成

分 benren chengfen). Class origin referred to the socio-economic background of a respon-

dent’s family before such a time that they had become economically independent. A young woman whose father stood at the assembly line, for example, would have a worker class

origin. Only when she was employed herself would she gain her own class status, but her

class origins as deﬁned by the head of the household in which she had grown up, would

remain the same.13

12 Examples of Schmittian readings of Maoist history include Dutton, Policing Chinese Politics and Mühlhahn, Criminal Justice in China 13 It is often claimed that family class origin was inherited from the father, but there is no ofﬁcial document establishing a principle of patrilineal inheritance. A 1983 explanation by the CCP Central Organization Department (“family origin refers to the class status of the family before the person in question became economically independent or before joining revolutionary service”) makes no reference to gender, see MLD: 1694. Nor is gender part of a deﬁnition by the department’s branch in Shanghai from 1954, see SHMA: B123-2-435, 1-2. A more ac-

83 The link between occupation and status has led some to argue the system of class was just the wine of the Old Regime resold in a Marxist bottle. Associations have been made to

Europe’s three estates, China’s four occupations, and even the Indian caste system.14 How- ever, the hierarchies of premodern societies were conservative by design while the most basic function and salient feature of class status was that it denoted a position within the old system of production. It is precisely because class status was not like these old hierarchies that those in Mao’s China, who challenged the outsized relevance of prerevolutionary categories, found in the caste system a compelling image for social critique.15 Had class status been a socialist hierarchy of estates, agricultural and industrial reorganization would have rendered designations like capitalist and landlord obsolete, but instead it was this moment that elevated the labels into administrative-legal statuses.

For people in the countryside, liberation, land reform, and class assignment came as a package. Although the timeline of land reform looked very different depending on region, local communities nevertheless experienced a collective moment of transition from Old So- ciety into New China that coincided with the division of classes. Not so in the cities. Here, there was no movement like land reform that called for a general assignment of class status. Instead, urban citizens completed their transition at various points in time depending on their position vis-à-vis a sprawling state organization that assimilated, sector by sector, all economic activity. In the cities of the early 1950s, class identity mattered primarily in sectors and institutions that represented New China and its government and consequently were held to a higher standard of integrity. Information on class status had to be submitted by applicants to the party and it was the subject of reports on heads of neighborhood

curate statement would therefore be that class origin was the expression of a family’s economic circumstances and that these were determined by the father’s occupation because of the patriarchal organization of Chinese family life. A comparison with the Agrarian Reform Law, one of the ﬁrst laws passed by the PRC government, and the practice of land reform can help with this point. Under the law, women received an allotment of land just like men but land was, in practice, kept by the family and controlled by the household head, cf. Hershatter, Women and China’s Revolutions, 223 14 The parallel to social estates have been made, with regards to the Soviet institution on which the Chinese system of class was based, in Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks!; Schram, “Classes, Old and New, in Mao Zedong’s Thought, 1949-1976”; for the impact of traditional Chinese categories on the language of class, see Kuhn, “Chinese Views of Social Classiﬁcation”; and for comparisons to caste, see Schram, “Classes, Old and New, in Mao Zedong’s Thought, 1949-1976,” 52; and also Friedman et al., Chinese Village, Socialist State, 101. 15 Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, 83.

84 committees in Shanghai (where it revealed a disturbing number of capitalists and straight

up gangsters). In the purges of the early 1950s, class belonging and ideological standpoint were considered together. This was the case, for example, in the campaign to clean away

“imperialist-enslavement mentality” among school and newspaper staff.16 Or in the purge

of legal specialists “tainted” by their work for the Guomindang state and liberal education

during the so-called Judicial Reform of 1952.17

Socialist transition would bring capitalist exploitation to an end, just as land reform had

ended exploitation in the countryside. If there was ever a moment to establish procedures

and criteria for urban classiﬁcation, mirroring those used during land reform, it would be

during the creation of public-private joint management ﬁrms. In recognition of this reality,

the Shanghai branch of the Fifth Ofﬁce, a government agency in charge of ﬁnancial and

commercial affairs, set up a pilot in the Penglai District in 1955, one of several test sites

established to prepare the way for the full launch of socialist transition the next year.

The Penglai District, on the west bank of the Huangpu river, was part of the industrial

belt surrounding Shanghai’s residential and commercial core.18 Around the district’s facto-

ries and cotton mills, small-time merchants set up their shops to sell everyday necessities

to workers. The concentration of factories also created a favorable environment for whole-

salers who sold goods produced in the next-door factories. Through the introduction of a

state contracting system, the government had achieved early dominance in the wholesale

sector. By late 1954, the state set in motion a gradual program to close down remaining

private wholesalers and absorb the staff into state commercial departments.19 The early

transformation of wholesalers made them ideal subjects to test policies before they were

adopted on a broader scale in sectors of the economy where the private share was far more

important. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Penglai pilot focused on the district’s

16 On neighborhood committees, Zhang, Yuanqu de dushi, 50–52; on thought reform in the universities, Pieragas- tini, “Reform and Closing Up.” 17 Tiffert, “Judging Revolution.”, 184–218 18 Henriot, Shi, and Aubrun, The Population of Shanghai (1865-1953), 75. The Penglai District became part of the Nanshi District when the government redrew the administrative divisions of Shanghai in 1959. Today, the neighborhoods in question make up the southeastern quarter of the Huangpu District. 19 Solinger, Chinese Business Under Socialism, 313–5.

85 sixty-eight cotton wholesalers.

From the ﬁrst few paragraphs of the Penglai report, it was clear that separating the different classes among Shanghainese traders would be a complicated affair. The report began with a historical exposé to explain how the city had become an amalgam of archaic and modern forms of trade: the small-scale trade that had existed in China for millennia and the capitalist commerce that had been forcefully introduced with the support of English gunboats. On the one hand, the city was home to a great number of petty merchants and peddlers who continued to rely on pre-capitalist modes of trade and whose customers were local. On the other hand, foreign interests had turned the city into the country’s largest trad- ing port and, in that capacity, its foremost market in the global network of colonial trade.

Consequently, Shanghai had become a home for “all types of trade imaginable” with “extreme disparities in terms of capital” between one another.20

The Penglai officials had only a bare minimum of guidance to help them navigate the confusing reality of local class relations. The report only cites two state documents as reference material: the Government Administration Council’s decision on rural class status from 1950 and a short definition of a self-employed artisan (小手工业主 xiao shougongyezhu) from an 1954 statistical survey.21 One was intended for rural classification and contained only a few lines on the small-scale artisanal and merchant “capitalists” that one could be expected to encounter in the countryside, the other included a definition of what qualified as an artisanal venture intended for descriptive statistics rather than bureaucratic ascription.

Neither received more than a passing mention in the report.

2.2 The Penglai standards

When their own leaders fell short, the Penglai ofﬁcials turned to the Marxist classics for counsel. Speciﬁcally, they looked to a passage in Lenin’s writings on the principle of class

20 SHMA: B123-2-1197, 5 21 For the 1950 decision, see MLD: 1416. As for the 1954 document, it was issued by the State Bureau of Statistics under the title “Dui shougongye huafen de zhishi” 对手工业划分的指示 (Instructions on the Divisions of the Handicraft Industry)

86 analysis, which the report quoted in full:

So-called classes are large groups of people. These groups differ from each other

by the different positions they occupy in a historically determined system of so-

cial production, by their different relations to the means of production (in most

cases expressly stipulated in law), by their different roles in the social organiza-

tion of labor, and thus by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which

theydisposeandthemodeofacquiringit. Eachclassismadeupbysuchgroups,

which can appropriate the labor of another owing to the different places they oc-

cupy in a deﬁnite system of social economy.22

While party ofﬁcials quoted Mao on the strategic necessity to distinguish between differ-

ent classes, they turned to Lenin for analytical clariﬁcation as to what actually constituted

a class. Despite its brevity, the above passage became the theoretical underpinning for Chi-

nese class assignment and an indispensable reference in the rare attempts to explain the

fundamental reasoning behind class assignment (including the lecture in Study discussed

in the Introduction).

In Penglai, the challenge facing the local functionaries was nothing less than to come up with a procedure to translate the language of class into a schema for ascription. They began

by reading Lenin’s work against the grains, as instruction manual rather than a historical

analysis of class society. This allowed for the following interpretation:

From [Lenin’s] deﬁnition, we know that in designating classes, the fundamental

principle of designating exploiting classes is primarily based in the relation to

the means of production that arise from people’s different positions in a speciﬁc

22 This passage from Lenin’s “A Great Beginning: Heroism of the Workers in the Rear ‘Communist Subbotniks’” (1919) has been translated from the Chinese, B123-2-1197, 5. For comparison, see the English translation in Lenin, Collected Works 29: 421; compare with Marx’ description of the historical development of the forces of production and the legal expression of relations of production as property relations in the preface to A Contribu- tion to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conﬂict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto,” in Marx and Engels, Marx-Engels Collected Works, 263

87 historical system of production, or within a speciﬁc socio-economic structure.23

This creative appropriation of Lenin’s text allowed the Penglai ofﬁcials to make the cog- nitive leap from description into ascription. The assignment of class status turned an idea into an institution. Its conceptual origins can be traced back to the early years of the twentieth century when political thinkers and labor activists translated the hierarchical organization of industrial society into class terminology. But it was only through state action that terms that had once served to describe, analyze, and agitate could be elevated into administrative-legal statuses. Thus, ascription reintroduced class into society as a concrete reality. And once transformed into an institution, class gained independence from socio- economic relationships and could live on even after the elimination of the system it had originally described.24 The entire institution of class status depended on the elevation that allowed Marxist categories of analysis to be read as state categories to which persons could be assigned.

In order to make class legible, the Penglai officials had to define some variables to stand in for what Lenin had referred to, rather abstractly, as “the dimensions of the share of social wealth […] and the mode of acquiring it.” They came up with five measures that could be used to distinguish the bourgeoisie: (1) the size of the firm; (2) the capital holdings of the

firm; (3) the number of workers employed; (4) the level of participation of managers and owners in the regular operations of the firm; and (5) the main source of income of managers and owners.25 With the help of these five proxies, owners and investors could be graded according to degree of exploitation and assigned to one of three classes: the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, and the semi-proletariat. This distinction would make it possible, on the level of the firm, to separate businesses to be assimilated into public-private joint management enterprises from smaller ventures that would merge into small-scale cooperatives.

On the level of the individual employee, the same distinction would help inform decisions

23 SHMA: B123-2-1197, 5 24 Here, I draw upon Colette Guillaumin’s account for the transformation of the idea of race into a concrete reality through “science” and adoption into law, see Guillaumin, “The Idea of Race.”, 66 25 SHMA: B123-2-1197, 5

88 on salaries, welfare beneﬁts, job placement, and the role in the program of thought reform.

The report described a procedure according to which local party organs would develop

criteria suited for the situation on the ground, rather than refer to nationwide standards.

After an agreement had been reached internally, local party ofﬁcials would publicize their

criteria and compile lists of class statuses. In the ﬁnal stage, groups of cadres and workers would convene to discuss the classiﬁcation. Involvement from the local government would

be limited to reviewing and signing off on the ﬁnal decision.26 In addition, the Penglai ofﬁ-

cials explicitly stated that class status should be assigned through “democratic judgment”

(民主评定 minzhu pingding), and even suggested that there should be some venue open to

appeal a capitalist label for the national bourgeoisie “unlike the bureaucrat-bourgeoisie and

the landlord class” enjoyed “the right to expression and the right to appeal.”27 If this liberal

attitude seems surprising in a document from 1954, it is worth remembering that the in-

clusion of a similar mechanism for appealing class status in the Agrarian Reform Law had

done little to reduce the force of land reform. As for the freedom of speech, it had been one

of the rights asserted in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China the year before

and would go on to feature prominently in the Hundred Flowers movement the follow-

ing year.28 It was only with the Anti-Rightist campaign that it became clear for just about

anyone that speech was a heavily conditioned privilege.

In the end, the Penglai ofﬁcials settled on not one, but two sets of criteria for distinguish-

ing class identities among the cotton wholesalers (Table 2.1). Depending on the criteria, the

sixty-eight cotton traders in Penglai district could be divided into (A) two major capitalists,

seventeen average capitalists, thirty-seven small capitalists, and twelve petty merchants,

or (B) zero major capitalists, six average capitalists, ﬁfty small capitalists, and twelve petty

merchants. It should be noted, that the two standards aligned on the key issue of where to

draw the cut-off line between small capitalists, on the one hand, and petty merchants, on

the other: both standards set the criteria for minor capitalists, and thus inclusion among the

26 SHMA: B123-2-1197, 8 27 SHMA: B123-2-1197, 8 28 Diamant and Feng, “The PRC’s First National Critique.”

89 Table 2.1: Penglai’s two standards for classifying capitalists

Standard Majorcapitalist Middlecapitalist Smallcapitalist Pettymerchant

>RMB50,000 RMB10,000-50,000 RMB2,000-10,000

A or or or

>15employees 10-15employees 3-9employees <3employees

>RMB100,000 RMB20,000-100,000 RMB2,000-20,000

B or or or or

>25employees 11-24employees 3-10employees <3employees Source: SHMA, B123-2-1197, 9 national bourgeoisie rather than the petty bourgeoisie, at three employees or two thousand yuan renminbi. Although this choice was not based on any formal standard for capitalist status, it was not an accident either for reasons that will be examined further on (see Chapter

5). The question of which of the two standards accurately represented the class composition of the district’s cotton traders was left without an answer.

The Penglai report was far from conclusive. The report listed, “for further consideration,” several factors that might further complicate class assignment. How would, the

Penglai ofﬁcials asked, differences in shareholders’ investment affect class status? Was the fact that someone had family members who were capitalists bear any weight in assessing degree of exploitation? If so, should the strength of parental ties and degree of family in- terdependence be a factor in determining class status? How to decide the class status of owners of capital-poor but labor-intensive ventures like bathhouses, hotels, and hairdress- ing saloons? Should the number of employees corresponding to a given class type be higher in such cases?29 Even during land reform, such questions had generally gone unanswered and party leaders proved even less helpful in matters related to urban class status. Still, it could have been the basis for something along the lines of a “universal schema” for identi-

29 SHMA: B123-2-1197, 7

90 fying capitalists.30 With some minor adjustments, one of the two Penglai standards could have been selected for implementation in urban communities across the country.

One local experiment does not a policy make. Can anything really be learned from the

Penglai pilot that would be relevant for our understanding of class assignment in Shanghai, not to mention other Chinese cities? One response would be to point to the general importance of local pilots for our understanding of the contingency of the Communist Party’s policy-making process.31 In itself, this is hardly a satisfactory answer. Historians would not have much to contribute much if they were to content themselves with pointing toward the very contingency that their discipline assumes. Far more significant is that the Penglai pilot offers rare evidence that a systematic approach to urban classification was under consideration in the months before socialist transition. Although the scale of the pilot was limited, its ambitions were not: the goal was nothing less than to produce a scalable model that could be extended to the entire commercial sector. Finally, the fact that the pilot’s findings reached the upper echelons of political power should dispel any lingering suspicion that the local character of the experiment somehow made it insignificant.

On January 3, 1956, the Shanghai Fifth Ofﬁce submitted the ﬁnal report from Penglai, under the title “Initial Opinions on Dividing Classes within Private Commerce” to the State

Council. To the bundle of reports in which the Penglai one was included, the municipal ofﬁce attached a cover letter addressed directly to Chen Yun, head of the Fifth Ofﬁce at the

State Council, and Yao Yilin, vice minister of commerce. Had they been so inclined, both

Chen and Yao were in a position where they could have pushed for a wider implementation of the Penglai model to provide a nationwide standard for the identiﬁcation of capitalists.

So what happened to the Penglai report after it ended up on the desks of Chen and Yao? To answer this question we have to leave Shanghai for Beijing and the ofﬁces of a district-level party branch for the National Political Consultative Conference Hall where the Chinese

30 U, “Rise of Marxist Classes,” 5. 31 In response to the unexpected continuation of Chinese Communist Party rule after decades of reform, some political scientists have singled out policy experimentation as a durable feature of the party’s “adaptive” style of governance and a factor in explaining the regime’s stability, see Heilmann and Perry, Mao’s Invisible Hand

91 Communist Party convened for the ﬁrst session of the Eighth Congress in September 1956.

2.3 A distinction that has lost or is losing its meaning

At the Eighth Congress, the Soviet delegates had the best seats. They sat right next to the elevated stage from which the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party led the meeting, backed up by a row of palm trees and facing the one thousand party cadres in attendance.

As they put on their headphones to listen to the interpreters’ rendition of the Chinese leaders’ speeches, they might have recalled another Eighth Congress, namely the Extraordinary

Eighth Congress of Soviets that their own government had convened twenty years earlier in

Moscow to approve the new Constitution of the USSR. Perhaps they thought that they were witnessing history repeat itself when Mao opened the congress with a speech celebrating a

“decisive victory in the socialist revolution” and looking forward to the building of a “great socialist industrialized state”—words that echoed those of Stalin twenty years prior.32 As- suming that they managed to stay alert throughout the longest speech at the congress, they would have heard Liu Shaoqi reiterate the need to learn from the Soviet experience and revolutionaries across the world.33 The Chinese would use the Soviet experience as a “mirror” that would reﬂect both aspects to draw from but also the deﬁciencies of the Stalinist model that they would do best to leave behind.34 The extent to which the Chinese would follow the path cleared by the Russians was a question open to discussion, but wherever the road ended up it was taking them further away from the prerevolutionary past.

In the Soviet Union, the adoption of the “Stalin” Constitution in 1936 marked the end of systematic discrimination on the basis of prerevolutionary class.35 The constitution had

32 Mao, “Opening Speech at the Eighth National Congress of the CPC.” 33 Liu, “The Political Report of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China to the Eighth National Congress of the Party.” 34 Shen, “The Twentieth CPSU Congress and the Eighth CCP Congress, 1956.” Shen writes that the Chinese leadership’s understanding of Stalinist development at this time was strongly inﬂuenced by the reform policies and resolutions passed by the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; an inspiration that is evident in the views Mao presented in his speech “On the Ten Major Relationships” on April 25, 1956. The speech contained a blueprint for China’s revolutionary future that clearly drew on Soviet reforms but was remained consistent with Mao’s view that Stalin’s mistakes were far less important than his contributions to socialist construction, see Leese, “Between Socialist Futures.” 35 Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class,” 758.

92 Figure 2.1: Voting at the Eighth Party Congress

restored the political rights of the disenfranchised, the kulaks, priests, rentiers, etc. Here,

two important qualiﬁcations should be made. First, the formal end of class discrimination

did not mean that the stigma associated with a former enemy status disappeared overnight.

Forms of discrimination and class stigma proved quite resilient in Soviet society despite

the constitutional changes.36 Second, the diminishing relevance of prerevolutionary class

identities clearly did not put an end to social stratiﬁcation or even the language of class which was still used to talk about inequalities and privileges in Soviet society. Still, these were issues of the postrevolutionary organization of society and as such referred to present

conditions rather than the illegitimate past.

Someone who joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1956—as the organization en-

rolled hundreds of thousands of new members to keep up with a cadre corps that swelled

by over two million (ca. 42%) in the ﬁve years leading up to socialist transition—could read

in a booklet fresh from the press that there was no longer a proletariat in the Soviet Union.37

36 Fitzpatrick, 760; this point is further elaborated upon in Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts, 170–84. 37 Li, Zhongguo gongchandang jiben zhishi wenda. For data on the increase of administrative employees and cadres,

93 The “elder brother” of socialism had not only overthrown a reactionary political rule but the working people had taken full control over the means of production. As all private property was now under common ownership, it was no longer correct to speak of a proletarian but only a “class of workers” (工人阶级 gongren jieji).38 This class of toilers was one that had been emancipated from exploitation, an entirely new class “the like of which the history of mankind had never known before.” This was how Stalin’s famous Short Course described the working class in the period that began with the adoption of a new constitution in 1936.39

The year 1956 looked set to become a comparable watershed in the history of Chinese socialism. The year before, Mao had told an assembly of the FIC that the “bright future” of the capitalists was within reach and that they would soon be assimilated into the toiling masses. In anticipation of doubts of whether this would actually be possible, Mao exclaimed

“I can write you a check!”40 In a sign that the Communist Party was in fact preparing for such a future, Chen Yi, the mayor of Shanghai, began addressing local merchants as

“comrades” to the delight of the latter.41 His counterpart in Beijing, Peng Zhen, adopted the same practice and offered the following explanation to the city’s capitalists: “We already entered into socialism, I will not call you Mister anymore, we are all comrades.”42 The two mayors spoke with considerable authority: both were conﬁrmed as members of the

Communist Party’s new Politburo at the Eighth Congress.

Deng Xiaoping, a third Politburo member, was even more direct in his report to the

Eighth Congress about the revisions to the Party Charter. There had been concerns that the proposed removal of the requirement that all new party members have a “good” class background might compromise the purity of the party organization. Deng answered that this requirement had been necessary in the past and that its role had been positive. The

see Lee, From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats, 208–209 38 Li, Zhongguo gongchandang jiben zhishi wenda, 10. 39 The Chinese Communists translated the Short Course in 1939 and the text had a formative impact on the leadership’s understanding of the Soviet model, see Li, “Instilling Stalinism in Chinese Party Members”; such was the influence of this text as a blueprint for socialist development not just in China but in Eastern Europe and Korea too that the editors of a recent critical edition might well be justified in calling it “one of the most influential books of the twentieth century,” Brandenberger and Zelenov, Stalin’s Master Narrative. 40 Mao, “Zai zibenzhuyi gongshangye shehuizhuyi gaizao wenti zuotanhui shang de jianghua.” 41 SHMA: C48-2-1261, 4 42 MLD: 5545, 20

94 conditions, however, had changed:

In the recent period, the circumstances have gone through fundamental

changes. Between workers and administrative staff there is only a class-internal

division of tasks; coolies and farmhands no longer exist; poor and middle

peasants have become members of agricultural production cooperatives, the

distinction between them will soon be of historical signiﬁcance only; revolu-

tionary soldier is no longer its own social status [社会成分 shehui chengfen]

due to the implementation of a system for military service; an overwhelming

majority of intellectuals already stand on the side of the workers in political

terms and in terms of family origins there is rapid change under way; and the

conditions separating the urban poor from the self-employed have more or less

disappeared […] What point is there anymore to separate these social statuses

into two categories? And if one had to separate them, how would one manage

to separate them clearly?43

In short, the abolishment of earlier rules about party admission was a natural response to a new historical situation: “the distinction between former social statuses has lost or is losing its meaning.”44 As for the bourgeoisie, although capitalists could still not join the party after the revision of admission rules, Deng judged that the changes to the country’s social relations were so great that it was “already in the process of elimination as a class.”45

In case it still needs to be repeated, the mythical divide that scholars long maintained separated Mao, the ideologue, from pragmatists like Liu and Deng—an assumption based in no small part on material produced with the goal of maligning the latter two in the Cul- tural Revolution—has scant support in the evidence.46 It is clear that Deng’s comments

43 Deng, “Guanyu xiugai dang de zhangcheng de baogao.”, 3 44 Deng, 3. 45 Deng, 1. Although the revisions to the Party Charter approved by the Eighth Congress abolished the stricter selection procedures that had formerly applied to non-workers, it upheld as a requirement for admission that applicants had not lived from the exploitation of other’s labor, which meant that those classified as capitalists, landlords, and rich peasants remained ineligible for party membership. 46 The case against explaining the policies of the 1950s in terms of ideological conflict was first made fifty years ago, see Lieberthal, “Mao Versus Liu?”

95 about class status at the Eighth Congress were perfectly consistent with statements made by Mao at the time. The same point has been made with respect to Liu Shaoqi’s remark the following year that “the term ‘class’ deserves to be reconsidered.”47 In fact, just a few weeks after the Eighth Congress, Mao wrote a comment to a People’s Daily editorial in which he explained that by giving up exploitation and supporting themselves through labor capitalists would turn themselves into laborers and that there would by then no longer exist any contradictions between their class and the workers and peasants.48

Unsurprisingly, capitalists responded with enthusiasm to the prospect of joining the ranks of the working masses in the near future. In the same report that described the reactions to Chen Yi’s new way of addressing the bourgeoisie, the Shanghai FIC quoted local capitalists eager to obtain their “red passports”—i.e. membership in the labor union—as soon as possible.49 Like a passport, a union membership granted not just passage into a community but access to communal goods. Most importantly, union membership meant access to welfare benefits and labor insurance that capitalists were collectively denied. The report noted that some were impatient to change their status. One man voiced frustration over a situation in which landlords would need only three to five years to change their class status whereas a capitalist would have to wait until the end of socialist transition some fifteen years in the future.50 The man’s complaint was based on a commonplace, but not quite accurate, interpretation of Mao’s comments to the FIC in October 1955.51 He felt that it was contrary to the principles of the United Front to let landlords, who were class enemies, change their class status before capitalists.52 The grievance was based on a presumed association between the socialist transformation of the economy and the end of class status system.

This same association, we have seen, was made by the Communist Party leaders at the

47 Kraus, Class Conﬂict in Chinese Socialism, 50 48 Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi, Mao Zedong sixiang nianbian, 792 49 C48-2-1261, 5 50 C48-2-1261, 5 51 Mao, “Zai zibenzhuyi gongshangye shehuizhuyi gaizao wenti zuotanhui shang de jianghua.” 52 For more on the conditions and attitudes of Shanghainese merchants in the face of socialist transition, see Feng, “Zhengzhi shengcun yu jingji shengcun.”

96 Eighth Congress. In front of the palm trees, Chen Yun sat only a couple of seats down from

Mao in the row of Politburo members. There was nothing stopping him from reaching over

to raise the question of how to classify capitalists with Mao. Or, to draw a more likely sce-

nario, he could have submitted the Penglai report to the Chairman with a recommendation

that the procedures it described be implemented nationwide. The evidence, however, sug-

gests that he did no such thing. As a matter of fact, the Penglai pilot was never discussed

in any important national forum and soon faded into obscurity. The proceedings of the

Eighth Congress help explain why there was not a stronger political interest in the classi-

ﬁcation of capitalists despite the centrality of class to the party’s ideology. For those who

gathered here to sum up past experiences and look to the future capitalists appeared inci-

dental. They were the members of a class already in the process of elimination or, as Stalin

had put it, the remnants of a moribund class.53

2.4 Classiﬁcation after all

A far more prosaic reality faced the bureaucratic ranks who had to carry out the every-

day administrative tasks that accompanied the great historical movement toward social-

ism. The state bureaucracy thoroughly reorganized the companies it acquired. Wherever

possible, smaller ﬁrms were merged together to create into vast enterprises so as to reduce

costs through economies of scale. Many ﬁnancially troubled ﬁrms were simply declared

bankrupt. In either case, the staff had to be reassigned to new jobs. This went equally for

factory workers as for the former managerial group, the “capital side employees” (资方人员

zifang renyuan) in ofﬁcial parlance. In this mundane setting the day-to-day identiﬁcation of

capitalists took place, without orders from above and without standardized procedures.

How, then, were capitalists identiﬁed as such? Wu Yiching proposes that urban class as-

signment was even less systematic than in the countryside—where class assignment was, we have seen, already quite unsystematic—and that it came about, in practice, through

53 Stalin, “Talk with the German Author Emil Ludwig,” 113.

97 some combination of ofﬁcial investigation and self-reporting about autobiographical history.54 By such means, he claims, most urban residents had been assigned a class status by the mid-1950s.55 Given that he cites no direct evidence in support, it is safe to assume that the historian relies on his extensive knowledge of the period to arrive at this hypothesis. It would be naive to expect a strict standard of proof since it is exceedingly difﬁcult to produce evidence for an administrative practice that was never put into policy.

Any compelling answer to how classiﬁcation played out in the cities will require a great deal of empirical work, beginning with the systematic collection of personnel ﬁles and materials related to class review from various sectors of society and throughout several cities.

It would also have to account for several rounds of classiﬁcation and reclassiﬁcation (see

Chapter 5). But before such empirical work can even be meaningfully conducted, questions will have to be formulated with close attention to analytical distinctions between the different fields (discursive, theoretical, administrative-legal) and modes (descriptive, ascriptive) of classification. One does not find such neat divisions in nature, so to speak, but it is nevertheless necessary to separate these fields and modes in theory so as to explain how a certain form of identification can increase in cohesiveness, or “harden,” through, for example, its legal codification.56 It is beyond the scope of the present study to provide a conclusive answer to the empirical question of urban classification, but the case of the capitalists offers some clarification as to what separates the bureaucratic ascription of class and the resulting administrative-legal class status from other types of identification.

In the 1970s, as a result of class taking on an unprecedented importance for the organization of urban as well as rural communities, the party leadership for the ﬁrst time began paying attention to a widespread tendency to treat managers, shareholders and sole proprietors placed in state-run companies and government agencies collectively as capitalists.

They found that assignment by default had been exasperated by the fact that even small- scale business operations and mom-and-pop stores were swallowed up by public-private

54 Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins 55 Wu, 40 56 Desrosières, “How to Make Things Which Hold Together.”

98 joint management ﬁrms (see Chapter 5). What had initially been conceived as a measure

to restructure larger companies became a one-size-ﬁts-all approach to socialist transition when the administration hurried to complete the campaign within the given timeframe.57

Viewed from this perspective, the capitalist class status does not appear as the product

of a schema imposed from above. Rather, the discretionary power of lower-level ofﬁcials

decided class status in a local setting. Thus, the classiﬁcatory system in question was char-

acterized not by a centralization of power but instead by a remarkable delegation of taxo-

nomic authority to the lowest level of the bureaucracy. With this in mind, it is time to take

a closer look at the meeting between former managers and shareholders—representatives

of the so-called capital-side—and the bureaucracy.

2.5 Capitalist by his own account

On a “Resume Form for Capital-Side Employees” submitted to the Shanghai Commercial

Bureau, one respondent dutifully ﬁlled in the blanks with the following information: “Sex:

Male”; “Particular skills: Business administration”; “Health status: Still good, blood pres-

sure is a bit high, hard of hearing on the left ear”; “Nationality: Han.” The responses were

given in a simple but elegant brushwork that set the form apart among hundreds of others

submitted in preparation for the merger of local clock factories into the Shanghai Clock and

Watch Company.58

Shanghai, and especially the high-end shopping streak along Nanjing Road, had been

the place to go for Chinese who desired, and could afford, ﬁrst-rate timepieces from Switzer-

land.59 Here, clock makers and watch dealers stood out among other vendors as they of-

fered the technology needed to join the “modern crowd of mechanized and powered mobil-

ity” who “accepted punctuality as a virtue.”60 After the founding of the People’s Republic,

57 Bo, Ruogan zhongda juece yu shijian de huigu, 409–10, 415–6. 58 SHMA: B183-1-6 59 On Nanjing Road as the center and symbol of modern commercial culture in China, see Cochran, Inventing Nanjing Road. 60 Yeh, Shanghai Splendor, 79.

99 foreign-made wristwatches continued to dominate but Nanjing Road lost its prominence as a state-run company in Beijing took charge of imports from 1952 in a move to centralize the distribution of luxury articles.61 New restrictions on the selling of watches further served to squeeze consumption and thereby to contribute to the planned redirection of capital from commerce to industry.62 In Shanghai, large watch traders found themselves short on supplies and many chose instead, with encouragement from the party, to invest in the domestic manufacture of clocks. Soon after, this path converged with others as the public-private con- versions advanced sector by sector. In January 1956, the over ﬁve hundred stores, thirteen suppliers, and sixty-two workshops in Shanghai’s clock and watch sector collectively began the process of public-private merger.63 It was time for the capital-side personnel to hand in their resumes.

Mr. Zhuang, the man with the nice-looking resume, owed his penmanship to his three years of classic schooling. He had left his school to take on his ﬁrst job, in the year of the

Russian Revolution, in a county not far from his native village in Zhejiang. Four years later, the year of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, Mr. Zhuang moved to Shanghai where he worked as an apprentice for an eyeglass company. Thirty-ﬁve years later, his career history ﬁnally aligned with the history of the global communist movement when he became an employee of the newly formed public-private joint management enterprise. The assets Mr. Zhuang reported in 1956 showed that he had done well for himself: the state valued his investments, which included substantial holdings in two major clock factories, at over 800,000 yuan.64 In addition to his investments, he had collected a salary of over

350 yuan per month as a manager of two watch stores on Nanjing Road. He was entitled to keep his high salary under the policy of paying out “retention salaries” (保留工资 baoliu gongzi) for capital-side personnel.65 The retention salary was a highly controversial policy

61 Shanghai riyong gongyepin shangye zhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Shanghai riyong gongyepin shangye zhi, 72. 62 Shanghai riyong gongyepin shangye zhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, 63. 63 Shanghai riyong gongyepin shangye zhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Shanghai riyong gongyepin shangye zhi; see also Karl Gerth’s analysis of the socialist wristwatch sector from the perspectives of the consumers, “Wristwatches (手表).” 64 SHMA: B183-1-6, 47-48 65 A 1958 opinion drafted by Xu Dixin and the State Council’s Eighth Ofﬁce noted that the policy was widely

100 that effectively undermined recent wage reforms by making up the difference between pay received according to the straightforward and comparatively egalitarian eight-grade wage system and income before the reform.66

Mr. Zhuang’s class status was never in question. Although it was left out on the form for capital-side employees—another indication that this group was considered to be part of one and the same class—a latter form confirms his capitalist status.67 Even without this confirmation, it is clear from his career background and substantial wealth that he was something of an archetypical capitalist. He was a member of that tiny clique whose lives came close to that of the capitalist of the mind. Most cases were less clear-cut. And there were assigned capitalists who did not agree with their designation and negotiated to have it revised. Although some disagreements over an assigned status may have been settled through a conscientious review of the employee’s career background, many if not most would have been decided by an official’s opinion on what was an appropriate label and given authority through the addition of an official seal. Like in most aspects of socialist management, decisions on class were highly decentralized and made either unilaterally by workplace officials or submitted for routine approval.68

Because it was state power that imbued local ofﬁcials with the authority to decide matters of class, it is close at hand to consider any disagreement as an individual’s struggle for recognition against the state.69 Indeed, local authorities interpreted stubborn “refusal” to

disliked but nevertheless defended the retention salaries offered to private-side personnel while providing data that showed that salaries on Mr. Zhuang’s level were comparatively rare: in Shanghai 1895 capitalists earned over 100 yuan, 592 over 300, and only 10 had a retention salary over 800. In other places, high salaries were even rarer. In Tianjin, only 29 capitalists had retention salaries of over 300 yuan, see BJMA: 022-010-01292, 1-5 66 Frazier, The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace, 146–7. 67 SHMA: B123-4-112, 29 68 Cf. Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism, 96. 69 It is only, says Friedrich Nietzsche, when a legal authority challenges us to give an account of our actions that memory is made. Through punishment, we are compelled to consider our actions in relation to some injustice and thus to reflect on who we were and who we are. One does not need to fully agree with the function Nietzsche ascribes to the legal order to appreciate that the meeting with an authority documented in personal dossiers and case files can be highly signficant in the study of political subjectivation in modern China, as per the proposition in Leese, “Case Files as a Source of Alternative Memories.”. On various self-writers in China and how they have produced life stories in active engagement with (or evasion of) the many rules and conventions of the autobiographical narrative, see the contributions in Dryburgh and Dauncey, Writing Lives in China, 1600- 2010. A critical engagement with Nietzsche’s account of how we become reflective about our own actions can be found in Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, pp. 9–22.

101 “admit” a capitalist status a form of political resistance.70 Before we take their word for it, we should try to determine what was actually the point of contention in these cases. In cases of disagreement over an assigned class status, it can be safely assumed that protests were more often directed against individual acts of misrecognition rather than the practice of class assignment. Such objections would in no way have challenged the state prerogative to classify. In any event, the absence of standards made genuine differences of opinion and confusion a real possibility. Uncertainty about the proper designation is the most likely explanation, to take just one example, for why two middle school students in Beijing reported their family origins as “merchant” and “artisan” and then, upon their employment as young women years later, entered “capitalist” in response to the same question.71 Often, the cadres seem to have been almost as confused about the class designations as the general population.

So while it is true that the discourse of class was pervasive, it is also the case that it was ambiguous to the point where disagreement cannot be readily interpreted as evidence of society’s opposition to the state.72. There is thus little reason to think that class status was always imposed on the classiﬁed in the urban setting. Especially in the case of the capitalists since the party’s ofﬁcial policy to treat capitalists as “assets” rather than “burdens” made this status far more ambiguous than the unequivocally bad label used to brand landlords in the countryside.

As for Mr. Zhuang, the Shanghai Commercial Bureau decided to put this particular asset to good use. Having looked through his application, the bureau ofﬁcials not only granted his wish to work in management but made him vice-director of the city’s largest company for the distribution of clocks, watches, and eyeglasses—one of the highest positions available for capital-side personnel. This decision was changed three years later after a closer

70 For an example, see Engman, “Vetting the People’s Servant.” 71 MLC: G8, G9 72 Once the challenge to the authenticity of experience is taken seriously, discourse appears even more fundamental and pervasive than before, but also open in a way that complicates the celebration of self-expression as a heroic act of resistance against the authoritarian state, Spakowski, “Destabilising the Truths of Revolution,” 135–7.

102 inspection of Mr. Zhuang’s dossier.

2.6 Problems both past and present

The personnel dossier was an archival double that would follow each state employee throughout their career. And with the transition to socialism, state employee came to mean just about any member of the urban working population—and a signiﬁcant portion of the rural population too—and through this collapse of the division between “the bureaucratic and the social” the dossier came to combine the functions of “human resources, political surveillance, and administrative discipline.”73 Ideally, the dossier would include (at least) one resume and one autobiography.74 The resume forms (履历表 lülibiao or 简历表 jianlibiao) presented the respondent as the sum of their answers to a set of standardized questions, whether the questions were designed identifying occupational strengths (“What level of education?”) or for the screening of employees’ political record (“Has joined or received training from a reactionary organization (Y/N)?”). They structured data so as to make it immediately legible to authorities, but the same impoverished quality that made them suitable for quick review limited their value in the event of closer inspection. The autobiography (自传 zizhuan), with its narrative form, was the ideal supplement. Both the resume and the autobiography were vital to the remarkable democratization of self-writing and self-presentation that occurred in the People’s Republic of China.75

Many dossiers fell short of the ideal and were left incomplete as the state hurried to complete socialist transition. Indeed, the CCP Shanghai Organization Department temporarily relieved capitalist cadres from the requirement of writing an autobiography following phone calls from worried party functionaries who presumably had a hard time seeing how

73 Chang, “Paper Affairs.” 74 If a complete dossier with a resume and an autobiography was the overall ambition, it was an explicit requirement for cadres, see MLD: 1666 75 Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party allegedly oversaw the “largest collective autobiographical project in modern history,” according to Schoenhals, “Life Stories.” following Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming.” Still, the awesome production and dissemination of cover letters and resumes that we know from capitalism in its more advanced stages has perhaps surpassed the socialist initiative both, as Jochen Hellbeck writes, “numer- ically and in terms of sociological breadth.” Whether this development is comparable to the state-sponsored projects in Russia and China depend only on the questions we pose.

103 they would manage to enforce this requirement while also meeting the pressed timetable for the reorganization of public-private joint management ﬁrms.76 In a notice on how to handle a capitalist who had collaborated with the revolutionary underground, the United

Front Department of the Shanghai First Commercial Bureau similarly instructed the company in question to find the man a job first and only then begin investigation into their past.77 Companies rarely gave more than a cursory screening to capital-side employees as they were assimilated into the public-private joint management firms.

It was only in late 1957 that the CCP Central Organization Department instructed Cadre

Examination Ofﬁces across the country to turn their attention to the “complex” historical problems in the public-private sector.78 Launched four years earlier, Cadre Examination was the name of a nationwide screening that spanned over several years and extended to each and every party and state functionary.79 Concerns about the historical integrity of the cadre corps were also what drove the completion and standardization of dossiers.

For resumes and autobiographies were intended for two types of reading: one aimed to gauge the skills and experience of an employee and the other to inspect the murky past of a member of the moral community of socialism. As the Cadre Examination progressed, the party developed standards for which types of activities and allegiances in Old Society made someone unﬁt to occupy positions of inﬂuence and authority in New China.

The historical integrity of capitalists was compromised by default. They ran the same risk as everyone else that the background checks might uncover some incriminating story from their prerevolutionary lives, but past membership in an exploiting class constituted a historical issue in and of itself. As part of their duty to carry out Cadre Examination, the First Commercial Bureau in Shanghai screened Mr. Zhuang together with twenty other

76 SHMA: B108-2-26, 46 77 SHMA: B123-3-57, 10 78 MLD: 1397 79 MLD: 1362. Cadre Examination updated the techniques and procedures that the Communist Party had developed to investigate cadres in Yan’an, as covered by Gao, How the Red Sun Rose. It also reproduced the same pattern of a period of “excess” followed by the rehabilitation of the falsely accused. It was not until after Mao’s death that the party leadership concluded that the scope of the Cadre Examination had been too broad and that it had engendered a great number of “unjust, false, and mistaken cases,” see Zhonggong zhongyang zuzhibu, Zhonggong zhongyang dangjiu yanjiushi, and Zhongyang dang’anguan, Zhongguo gongchandang zuzhishi ziliao, 9

104 “capitalist element” cadres. The ﬁnal decision on what to do with the capitalists, however,

had to wait until the spring of 1959. The way in which the bureau’s examination proceeded

perfectly illustrate how timelines became fuzzy and one policy blended into another as local

administrators struggled to keep up with the constant output of campaigns from Beijing.80

As the bureau inspectors submitted Mr. Zhuang and his colleagues to a thorough back-

ground check to comply with orders from the CCP Central Organization Department, they

made sure at the same time to evaluate the capitalist personnel’s political conduct according

to the guidelines of a separate rectiﬁcation campaign.

The review of Mr. Zhuang found both compromising historical issues and problems of

conduct. The inspectors noted that he had been part of several reactionary organizations—

the most damning revelation was that he had joined the Guomindang headed by the collabo-

rator Wang Jingwei—before 1949. It was also noted that he had owned two riﬂes, although

he had turned these over to the police by his own free will shortly after the Communist

takeover of Shanghai. His record of political conduct was equally poor, if not worse. In the

sessions for mutual criticism arranged especially for capitalists, he had been slow to admit

his own faults and reluctant to criticize others. Overall, his attitude revealed, according

to the inspectors, a “deep-rooted hatred for the party.”81 In accordance with rectiﬁcation

campaign guidelines, Mr. Zhuang was ranked as one out of eight “center-rightists” among

the capitalist cadres under the Shanghai First Commercial Bureau. Considered slightly less

reactionary were the seven “center-centrists” and four “center-leftists”; there was only one

“leftist” among the twenty-one.82 None were labelled “rightist” because the purpose of the

rectiﬁcation campaign was to rank those who had not been identiﬁed as hostile to the party

and to socialism in the Anti-Rightist movement of the previous year.

What Mr. Zhuang and the other capitalists were experiencing was the “ordinary rectiﬁ-

cation” that was meant to accompany and complement the Anti-Rightist campaign.83 If the

80 Diamant, “Policy Blending, Fuzzy Chronology, and Local Understandings of National Initiatives in Early 1950s China.” 81 SHMA: B123-4-112, 29 82 SHMA: B123-4-112, 1 83 MLC: G814-1, 18

105 campaign against rightists was akin to a tiger hunt, to use one of the Communist Party’s preferred idioms, ordinary rectiﬁcation was about swatting ﬂies. The work to reform bourgeois minds—a sustained effort that was just as important in political terms and societal impact as the better known projects of thought reform among the intelligentsia and lumpenproletariat—involved political study session, mutual criticism, and, most importantly, participation in manual labor.84 Still, it could not compare with the Anti-Rightist campaign, which had also hit hard against representatives of the bourgeoisie. In Shanghai’s business community alone, as many as 2,704 were labelled “rightists.”85

The Anti-Rightist campaign affected more than just the “rightists.” For our concerns, it was perhaps more signiﬁcant as the beginning of the end for an optimistic view on capitalist integration under socialism. This optimism had been especially prominent during the “airing of views” of late 1956 and early 1957, when Mao Zedong had encouraged free expression and criticism of the party. In response, some business owners affected by socialist transition chose to disregard their politically vulnerable position—and ignore warnings from their peers—to speak out on concerns linked to the state acquisition of their companies and the future role of capitalists under socialism. Others were formally committed to intervene as high-ranking members of the Two Associations. With high position came not just privilege but also the danger of having to speak on behalf of the bourgeoisie.86 Regard- less of motivation, those who had given voice to the concerns of capitalists became likely targets for the Anti-Rightist campaign.

Zhang Naiqi was one of highest-ranked spokespersons for the bourgeoisie and then became one of the most prominent victims of the Anti-Rightist campaign. He was a founding member and deputy director of Minjian as well as minister of food when he was denounced as a major theorist representing the bourgeois right. His downfall began after his proposi-

84 For a short but insightful essay on the topic of thought reform among capitalists, see Feng, “Shenfen, yishi yu zhengzhi”; on thought reform among intellectuals, Pieragastini, “Reform and Closing Up”; Zhang, “Thought Reform and Press Nationalization in Shanghai”; and among the urban poor, the criminals, and the self- employed, Smith, Thought Reform. 85 Shanghai gongshang shetuan zhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Shanghai gongshang shetuan zhi, 416. 86 U, “Dangerous Privilege.”

106 tion that the Chinese capitalists constituted a “red bourgeoisie” capable of correcting their

past errors, and that they could and should have an important role to play in the socialist

project.87 Zhang was immediately met with harsh criticism. At an October 1956 the dele-

gates at a top-level meeting of the Minjian were all but unanimous in rejecting his ideas.88

But Zhang found support for his position in fundamental state principles. One report puts

him down as having challenged his critics to have a look at the stars of the national ﬂag, which had one star for each of the four classes, including the national bourgeoisie. Zhang

allegedly mocked his interlocutors asking if there was “any white color” on the ﬂag?89 For

Zhang, and many others with him, socialism meant the end of the capitalists’ ambiguity: if

they were not red, as he maintained, then they had to be white.

Attacks on Zhang Naiqi and other representatives of the bourgeoisie illustrate how po-

litically volatile the question of the capitalists’ place within socialism had become. In May

1957, Mao let his secretary know that he was displeased with how vocal the business com-

munity had become in the public debate: “the bourgeoisie seeks nothing but proﬁts and it

has exposed its nature of pursuing prestige and gain.”90 Following sharp criticism during

the “airing of views,” Mao no longer suggested that the state should create conditions in which the “gain” coveted by the bourgeoisie became identical to the “gain” of people and

nation. But if Mao rejected the “rightist” view that capitalists fully belonged within the

socialist community he never endorsed the “leftist” position that they should be cast out

together with the enemies of the revolution. The Communist Party’s policy toward the cap-

italists went through several cycles of tightening and relaxation, but the Yan’an principle of

the national bourgeoisie’s essential ambiguity remained throughout Mao’s life.

Ideological indecision on the top translated into makeshift solutions to the capitalist

87 “Zhang Naiqi dui minzu zichanjieji de kanfa” 章乃器对民族资产阶级的看法 (Zhang Naiqi’s views on the national bourgeoisie). Xuanjiao dongtai no. 170 (November 26, 1956). Between 1953 and 1966 the Xuanjiao dongtai was the Central Propaganda Department’s most important internal bulletin, issued only to members of an exclusive circle at the highest levels of party leadership. It covered a wide range of topics related, in the broadest possible sense, to domestic and international propaganda and the surveillance of public moods. All issues of Xuanjiao dongtai cited here are kept at the University of Freiburg. 88 “Zhang Naiqi dui minzu zichanjieji de kanfa” 89 Schoenhals, “Zhang Naiqi.” 90 Xiao-Planes, “Buy 20 Years,” 232.

107 problem on the ground. This brings us back to the review of Mr. Zhuang at the intersection of two campaigns. The “ordinary” rectification was meant to mop up after the Anti-Rightist campaign. Similarly, the cadre examination was designed not to disrupt the normal operations of the administration, in explicit opposition to “campaign-like assaults.”91 Cadre examination focused on historical problems that had not registered in earlier campaigns to weed out counterrevolutionaries. Rectification would address reactionary tendencies among those who nevertheless did not merit to be labelled “rightists.” It is in the very nature of nationwide policies to cut reality into very fine slices. Only by singling out some small part of the whole did they become intelligible across disparate communities. But by the same token, administrative practice could piece reality back together. The Chinese bureaucracy of the 1950s, and the party organization especially, was the domain of generalists who approached a great range of “problems” in a holistic manner. When the problems took the shape of people, cadres tended to respond in a manner that blurred the lines between punishment, education, and staffing decisions.

Following the review, a decision to demote Mr. Zhuang was taken on April 20, 1959.

Given the timing and context of this decision, prefaced as it was by a detailed account of his historical problem and reactionary attitude, it would appear that this was a politically motivated punishment. But a closer look at the circumstances show how the coming together of economic organization and moral community under socialism complicated both the distinction between administrative-rational and political-ethical as well as the very definition of punishment. For the party officials evaluating Mr. Zhuang made no reference to politics in their final decision. Instead, they complained that he did not understand the business of the company.92 They felt that a career in the shops on Nanjing Road had not prepared him for managing a large firm. The First Commercial Bureau agreed and followed the recommendation to demote him to a lower-level job in a department store.

91 MLD: 1362 92 SHMA: B123-4-112, 29

108 2.7 When Mao’s check bounced

On June 7 and 8, 1957, Shanghai’s Wenhui Daily published a two-part philosophical essay written by Xu Maoyong.93 A high-ranking cultural ofﬁcial and proliﬁc essayist at the time,

he had earned his revolutionary credentials in the 1930s as one of the leading members

of the Left League, a short-lived association of authors celebrated for their support of the

revolution. On the surface, Xu Maoyong’s argument resembled the one Xu Dixin had put

forward in his speech at the Beijing conference the previous year. Both reﬂected on the rela-

tionship between class and essence, but where the 1956 speech had emphasized difference,

the 1957 essay made a case for sameness.

Published as a commemoration of Mao’s famous Yan’an Talks, Xu Maoyong’s essay

came under attack for its interpretation of “human nature.” The Yan’an comments, the

argument went, were immediately relevant for the question of how capitalists and other

non-toilers would become recognized as full members of the working people. Xu criticized what he held to be a widespread misreading of Mao’s assertion that in class society there

is only human nature “in the concrete” not “in the abstract.” In Mao’s words, class society

featured “only human nature of a class character.” While agreeing with this principle, Xu

maintained thattherewas a tendency to forgetthatitwas class society that negated “common

human nature” and that the promise of communism was to be a negation of the negation

that would restore and enrich human nature. A failure to understand the socialist project as

a restoration of human nature, he argued, was not only an error of theory but also distorted

understanding of concrete social issues. With regards to the prospects of joining the socialist

community of production, this meant that individual efforts would never make “new men”

out of capitalists and bourgeois intellectuals unless the authorities conceded that there was

a “basis of common human nature” underneath the cover of class. Xu Maoyong’s humanist

position received ﬁerce criticism in the Anti-Rightist campaign and his detractors rejected

93 “Guo le shi de jinian—Chongdu ‘Zai Yan’an wenyi zuotanhui de jianghua’” 过了时的纪念——重读 “在延安文艺座谈会的讲话” (Overdue Commemoration—Rereading “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art”)

109 the attempt to link workers and capitalist together based on human nature in the abstract.94

Not long after the ﬁerce attacks on Xu Maoyong’s “rightist” case for common nature sub- sided, the Communist Party mobilized for its most ambitious and “leftist” campaign yet.

The Great Leap Forward promised to put a large distance between the socialist present and the class society of past. By the time the Eighth Congress convened for its second session in

May 1958, almost two years after the ﬁrst one, the party leadership had adopted the Leap strategy as its approach to development.95 An earlier policy to cut back on investment to achieve a slower rate of economic growth under the slogan of opposing “rash advances” had given way to the opposite line. In 1958, there was a surge investment and a massive diversion of resources and labor away from the production of consumer goods toward producer goods—the particular emphasis on steel and iron made famous through the “back- yard furnaces” to smelt metal in villages across the country.96 But the Leap went beyond industrial policy alone, indeed to consider it solely as a strategy for economic development would be to impose an artiﬁcial division of society into sectors; it is better understood as a concerted push to fast track the period of socialist transition by industrialization at the level of production and intellectual emancipation at the level of ideology.97

For capitalists and other liminal groups, the Leap presented the best opportunity to join the socialist community to date. On the eve of social transition, Mao had promised to

“write a check” guaranteeing the capitalists a “bright future” and it seemed that following collective exertion in the Leap they would ﬁnally be able to cash in. The acceleration toward the future would distance China from its past of exploitation. As the Chinese economy made its leap into industrial modernity, the capitalists would get a chance to leapfrog into the community of toilers.

In 1958, capitalists and bourgeois intellectuals emulated the methods used for industrial

94 “Xu Maoyong renwei you gongtong renxing, suoyi Zhongguo zichanjieji neng gaizao cheng shehuizhuyizhe” 徐懋庸认为有共同人性，所以中国资产阶级能改造成社会主义者 (Xu Maoyong believes that the Chinese bourgeoisie can transform itself into socialists because there is a common human nature) Xuanjiao dongtai no. 257 (June 21, 1957); see also Li, Pipan Xu Maoyong de xiuzheng zhuyi. 95 Teiwes and Sun, China’s Road to Disaster, 83. 96 Bramall, Chinese Economic Development, 125. 97 Cf. Leese, Mao Cult, 70–75.

110 advancement to transform their own minds. Speaking at a public rally in Tianjin in April,

Hu Juewen, founding member of Minjian, proposed a “leap forward in terms of ideological

standpoint” to follow the “leap forward in production work.”98 Thousands of capitalists in

the city participated in a collective pledge to improve their relations with the masses, heed

thecommandsofworkers, andputinhoursonthefactoryﬂoororintheﬁelds.99 When Tian-

jin made a formal promise to the National People’s Congress that the city’s capitalists and

bourgeois intellectuals would transform themselves into bonaﬁde toilers within ﬁve years,

Shanghai raised the ante by declaring its ambition to do the same in just three.100 The com-

petition between cities was matched by a competition in the workplaces as capitalists and

intellectuals formed teams to compete in conveyor belt confession and self-criticism. This

new and improved method of thought reform was given the name “handing over your

heart campaign” (交心运动 jiaoxin yundong) because the participants were encouraged to

make known their deepest and most reactionary thoughts. In imitation of industrial plan-

ning, capitalists and bourgeois intellectuals wrote personal plans in which they pledged to work seven-day weeks and twelve-hour shifts so as to reform themselves in not ﬁve, not

three, but two years time.101

The Great Leap Forward came with a timeline for when the capitalists would be assim-

ilated. Although the party never formally stated when that would be, high-level ofﬁcials

supported the new methods of thought reform. Li Weihan, the head of the Central United

Front Department, gave his approval to friendly competition between cities to speed up

capitalist self-reform and announced that the transformation of capitalism, which had be-

gan with the transformation of the means of production and proceeded with the campaign

against rightists, was now reaching in its third and ﬁnal stage: self-transformation.102 How-

ever, once the Leap turned out to be not just a political failure but a human catastrophe of

unprecedented proportions, all prospects for capitalist assimilation were put in question.

98 MLC: G814-1, 18 99 MLC: G814-1, 20-25 100 MLC: G814-1, 20 101 MLC: G804, 40 102 MLC: G804, 26

111 Suddenly, Mao’s metaphorical check bounced. What this meant for the capitalists’ position within the socialist community of production is the question for the following chapter.

112 3 Threshold economy

Everything about the capitalists had an expiration date. For a time, it seemed certain that

the date beyond which the bourgeoisie would no longer exist as a class would occur no

later than 1962. This year was to mark the completion of the Second Five Year Plan. It was

to be the year when China became, if not a fully developed socialist country, then at least

something not too far away from it. It was the year when, had things moved according

to plan, public-private joint management would have become fully nationalized. It was

also meant to be the ﬁnal year in which the government paid out dividends to capitalists.

With the last dividend paycheck, the last remnants of the old ownership system would fade

away and so would the last material obstacle for capitalists to join the ranks of the toiling

masses. As the expiration date was set only six years after socialist transition, all policies

and institutions set up to govern the capitalist population were created with a planned

obsolescence.

Chen Shutong, the chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, was convinced that his organization would lose its function upon completion of the Sec-

ond Five Year Plan. During a brief hospital stay in spring 1959, he told the party ofﬁcials who came to visit that it would seem a “joke” to maintain something called a Federation

of Industry and Commerce when there were no industrialists and merchants left, even if

it so happened that the bourgeoisie as a class would not be “completely eliminated” by

1962.1 In any case, he predicted, most capitalists would be able to join the union and for the

1 “Chen Shutong dui Gongshanglian de qiantu he ru dang wenti de kanfa” 陈叔通对工商联的前途和入党问题的看法 (Chen Shutong’s view on the issues of the FIC’s future and joining the party). Lingxun, no. 30 (March 19, 1959), 3. Founded in 1949 under the supervision of the Central United Front Department, Lingxun was a

113 few who could still not be allowed entry into the community of toilers, the Minjian would be more than sufﬁcient. If for some reason the Communist Party decided to maintain the

Federation, Chen believed that at the very least it would have to change its name to better reﬂect socialist realities. The year before, at a summer conference in Beidaihe, the Commu- nist Party Politburo had adopted a resolution—the topic of which was the establishment of communes in the countryside—that explicitly stated that communism in China was “no longer a remote future event.”2

By the turn of the decade, the future that had looked so attainable at the outset of the

Great Leap Forward had come crashing down. To meet the aggressive production goals set in the massive development push that was the Leap, ofﬁcials had accepted unrealistic quo- tas and exaggerated output and oversaw a massive diversion of manpower from farming to industry. The effects for a grain supply system already under stress from preexisting imbal- ances proved disastrous.3 In the ensuing famine, between 1959 and 1961, tens of millions of lives were lost.4 The main victims of the famine were the rural producers of grain—death was the ﬁnal criterion of the gap between city and countryside—but the urban consumers also felt the effects of cut food rations and quickly depleting grain supplies.5 Even in Shang- hai, which had some of the best food security in the country, the situation was so dire as to be described, with only slight exaggeration, as a shortage of “everything except for running water.”6 For years after the famine, shortages and cutbacks continued to affect the urban

top-secret bulletin circulated only at the highest level of the party organization to keep the leadership updated on the concerns and opinions of members of the democratic parties and other non-party officials. 2 Zhonggong zhongyang, “Guanyu zai nongcun jianli renmin gongshe wenti de jueyi,” 450. 3 The above are commonly cited factors but it should be added that the current state of research does not allow the identification of a single cause or even a hierarchical ordering of contributing factors, see Wemheuer, Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union, 11; Bramall, Chinese Economic Development, 130. 4 The estimation of the number of deaths from the famine remains a complex and contentious affair. The first calculations, made by demographers in the 1980s, suggested a death toll between 16.5 and 30 million, see Coale, “Population Trends, Population Policy, and Population Studies in China,” 85–97; Peng, “Demographic Conse- quences of the Great Leap Forward in China’s Provinces,” 639–70; Ashton et al., “Famine in China, 1958-61,” 613–45; recent interventions by historians, with access to new sources, have tended to revise the estimation up- wards: on the basis of a survey of population statistics in official county gazetteers, one scholar sets the death toll at 32.5 million, see Cao, Da jihuang, 282. 5 Brown, “Great Leap City.” 6 “Shanghai minzhu renshi dui Ke Qingshi tongzhi guanyu jingji shenghuo wenti de shuoming de fanying” 上海民主人士对柯庆施同志关于经济生活问题的说明的反映 (Reactions from Shanghai’s democratic personages regarding Comrade Ke Qingshi’s explanation of economic livelihood issues). Lingxun no. 83 (1959), 5

114 population as policies of austerity replaced grand visions of a future of plenty.

In the wake of the famine, the future seemed too unsure of a target to guide political

action. The party was “still acting blindly to a very large extent” Mao remarked in a 1962

speech that looked not to the Soviet Union but to the wartime past for guidance.7 In the

name of “adjustment,” senior economic planners rolled out a series of cutbacks and aus-

terity measures. Although the strategic mobilization of labor in massive industrial projects

remained a cornerstone of China’s development strategy, no subsequent initiative was as

bold as the Leap.8 The retrenchment affected almost the entire range of state activities: from

the brief return of a market for certain everyday items to a sustained involution of the pro-

paganda state and the resurgence of unofﬁcial culture.9 On a deeper level, the famine killed

the vision of a society sufﬁcient in and by itself. Before the leap, Mao had considered the

idea that the internal relationships of socialist society could serve as the contradictions that

he thought were necessary for propelling the nation forward.10 But the attempt to carve a

new path to socialist victory failed catastrophically and through the split with the Soviet

Union China lost its socialist “elder brother” and model of development. In the depressed

mood of the early 1960s, Mao came to the conclusion that China had not yet done enough

to rid itself of its history of class oppression. The ghost of class struggle would haunt him

for the rest of his life.

In the Chinese history of elite politics, two expressions of the pessimism of the early

1960s are typically opposed to each other: the politics of austerity and adjustment against

the revival of class rhetoric. If the actors are split along conﬂict lines that appeared later on—

Liu Shaoqi backed by the likes of Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping on one side and Mao on

the other—the story gains a dramatic tension. Instead of opposing the economic rationality

of one side to the ideological radicalism of the other, this chapter demonstrates how the welfare policies that the state introduced as part of the economic adjustment contributed to

7 Mao, “Talk at an Enlarged Working Conference Convened by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China,” 16. 8 Meyskens, “Third Front Railroads and Industrial Modernity in Late Maoist China.” 9 Feng, “Ziyou shichang zhengce yanjiu”; Johnson, “Beneath the Propaganda State.” 10 Leese, “Between Socialist Futures”; Schoenhals, “Original Contradictions.”

115 the cohesion of the capitalist group and in this way they added to the political relevance of class status. Thus, the separate organization of welfare provided the economic and institutional conditions for maintaining the capitalists as a liminal population, but it also played into the framing of social grievance and political contention in the language of class that would become ubiquitous with the breakdown of the above arrangement in the Cultural

Revolution.

3.1 Perpetual rehabilitation

An ofﬁcial decree cut short the capitalists’ ideological leap into the community of toilers.

On September 26, 1961, the Party Center ordered a general expulsion of capitalists and other “exploiting elements” from the party and the union.11 If this marked the end of the the Great Leap Forward push to accelerate the remolding of capitalists, there had been setbacks from the very beginning. Many capitalists were old or had limited experience of hard physical labor and the combination of overwork and a diminishing food supply was a recipe for fatigue and illness. This applied equally to the many women who, by virtue of marriage, were added to the category of “capitalist dependents” (资本家家属 zibenjia jiashu) and mobilized as members of the capitalist household.12 In the early months of 1959, capitalist housewives had been sent to lay a road between Minhang and Wujing, two small towns located along the Huangpu River some twenty kilometers south of Shanghai. News that these women had been mustered without distinction based on previous experience of manual labor or age and without consideration of menstruation, pregnancy, or bound feet

11 “Zhongyang guanyu chuli zichanjieji fenzi de dangji he gonghui huiji wenti de pishi” 中央关于处理资产阶级分子的党籍和工会会籍问题的批示 (The Center comments on the handling of the issue of bourgeois elements’ party and labor union membership). Tongyi zhanxian gongzuo, no. 10 (October 26, 1961), 2. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Tongyi zhanxian gongzuo was the main internal bulletin of the Central United Front Department. It disseminated and explained policy decisions to local United Front ofﬁcials. All issues of Tongyi zhanxian gongzuo cited here can be found at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Universities Service Centre for China Studies. 12 The authors of ideological transformation saw the education of wives and children as conducive to the remolding of the household as a whole. Therefore, the mobilization of dependents was important not only to improve their own ideological consciousness, but also to help remold capitalist husbands and fathers. For an account of the organization and mobilization of capitalist housewives, see Leighton, “Capitalists, Cadres, and Culture,” 123–84.

116 sparked criticism from the Shanghai Party Committee.13 As for the transformation of the

mind, there were other sorts of complications. One report, which reached the highest eche-

lons of the party, told of a professor from an engineering school in Wuhan who had taken

advantage of the “heart-baring” program to share his fantasies of devastation, desecration,

and sexual violence: “I hope there is a ﬂood to drown this society,” “When I take a leak, I

imagine ﬂushing Chairman Mao down the toilet,” “When people say that the Communist

Party is the sun, I want to pierce my sex through that sun.”14

Despite early setbacks, high-ranking members of the Two Associations openly discussed

the possibility to join the party both amongst themselves and in meetings with Communist

Party ofﬁcials during the Great Leap Forward. Huang Yanpei of the Minjian suggested it would boost the project of self-transformation if some exemplary capitalists were allowed

to join the party, while the more cautious Chen Shutong of the FIC thought it better to wait until after 1962 before opening up for applications.15 At the lower rungs of the party

bureaucracy, many ofﬁcials felt the time had come to remove capitalist labels, which in

turn would clear the path to party and union admission. In late 1958, the United Front

Department in the northeastern port city of Dalian convened a meeting on the program

for capitalist self-transformation, only to discover that many factory directors and party

secretaries felt that the remolding process was “pretty much ﬁnished.”16 From Beijing there

had been strong signals, if no clear promises, that the capitalists would shortly be accepted

into the ranks of the people (see Chapter 2).

13 “Shanghai shiwei pizhuan shiwei tongzhanbu guanyu Xincheng qu zuzhi zibenjia jiashu canjia zhu lu gongcheng zhong fasheng de yi xie wenti de yijian de baogao” 上海市委批转市委统战部关于新城区组织资本家家属参加筑路工程中发生的一些问题的意见的报告 (The Shanghai Municipal Committee comments and transmits the Municipal United Front Department’s report with an opinion regarding some issues arising from Xincheng District organizing capitalist dependents to join road construction projects). Tongyi zhanxian gongzuo, no. 5 (February 21, 1959), 5 14 “You xie ren jie ‘jiaoxin’ gongji he zhouma dang he shehui zhuyi” 有些人借 “交心” 攻击和咒骂党和社会主义 (Some persons take advantage of the “heart-baring” to attack and curse the party and socialism). Xuanjiao dongtai, no. 69 (June 3, 1958), 4–6 15 “Huang Yanpei shuo, ruguo Minjian gugan fenzi neng jiaru gongchandang, hui gei gongshangjie hen da guwu” 黄炎培说，如果民建骨干分子能加入共产党，会给工商界很大鼓舞 (Huang Yanpei says if backbone elements from the Minjian can join the Communist Party, it can be a great boost to industrialists and merchants). Lingxun, no. 73 (July 7, 1960), 3–4; “Chen Shutong dui Gongshanglian de qiantu he ru dang wenti de kanfa,” 3 16 “You xie dangyuan renwei zibenjia gaizao de ‘chabuduo le’” 有些党员认为资本家改造的 “差不多了” (Some party members think that the transformation of capitalists is “pretty much ﬁnished”). Xuanjiao dongtai no. 169 (December 29, 1958), 7

117 The basis for the 1961 decision to expel capitalists was a useful fiction. The explanation given by the Central Organization Department and the Central United Front Department for the admission problem—included in a report transmitted together with the Party Cen- ter’s directive—placed the blame with lower-level officials and what was called a confused viewpoint on class and a muddled understanding as to the limits of the program of self- transformation.17 The report warned that local authorities around the country had allowed a significant number of capitalists—mostly small capitalists but also a number of important ones—into both party and union. Cases of capitalists being admitted into the party dated back to 1956, with a significant uptick in the Great Leap Forward. With the exception of capital-side personnel who did not collect dividends—the significance of this distinction will become apparent in the following—all capitalists who had successfully joined union and party were to be thrown out.18 The reality that the report would not acknowledge, so as to maintain the collective fiction of an ever-consistent party line, was that the decision to expel capitalists had more to do with a newfound pessimism with regards to the limits of transformation—of the economic system and of individual minds—than bureaucratic oversight.

The year 1962 came and went without the capitalists receiving their proverbial “red passports.” Instead, the post-Leap depression consigned capitalists to what Feng Xiaocai aptly calls “lives of everyday transformation.”19 Work units and residence committees continued to rank capitalists according to their degree of ideological backwardness, but there was no longer any target for when assimilation would be completed. Barred from ordinary study sessions and political meetings, capitalists convened amongst themselves to study the latest directives from the party, read up on political theory and revolutionary writings, or engage in mutual criticism—all under the supervision of the party’s organs for United

17 “Zhongyang guanyu chuli zichanjieji fenzi de dangji he gonghui huiji wenti de pishi,” 2 18 The report served an additional purpose as reference for the admission of small merchants and peddlers who were employed in the state sector but did not receive any dividends into both the Communist Party and the union, see, “Guanyu xiaoshang xiaofan ru dang ru gonghui de wenti” 关于小商小贩入党入工会的问题 (Concern- ing the issue of small merchants and peddlers joining the party and union). Gongshang xingzheng tongbao, no. 220 (August 29, 1962), 13 19 Feng, “Shenfen, yishi yu zhengzhi.”

118 Front Work. When the authority that could assess the capitalists’ conduct suddenly decided

that their integration was highly improbable in the near future, self-transformation became

a sisyphean routine. For the rest of the socialist period, capitalists were stuck in a state of

perpetual assimilation.

3.2 The capitalist and the commune

Without “red passports” in hand, the capital-side personnel could not pass the ﬁnal thresh-

old to become full members of those communities that had formed around the work units.

In addition to the restrictions to political participation, the capitalists had limits access to

many of the welfare provisions and beneﬁts allocated through the work unit. Even if capi-

talists could beneﬁt from comparatively high incomes from retention salaries and dividend

payments, employment in the socialist system was more about the beneﬁts and entitlements

that came with the job than with the wages themselves.20 These included free medical care,

compensation for non-work injuries and illness, death beneﬁts, old-age pensions, livelihood

supplements, grain price subsidies, and so on.21 The work unit was also an important node

in the distribution of ofﬁcial culture and entertainment, which became part of the “social wage” provided by the state.22

As many of the beneﬁts were provided through the union and restricted to workers,

the state had to regulate welfare provision for capitalists separately. In some regards, this

meant limitations. According to one rule, capitalists whose assets had been valued at over

two thousand yuan were supposed to cover their own medical fees and received no salary

for the period they were ill.23 In others, it came with signiﬁcant delays. The State Council

did not reach a separate decision for capitalists on the highly sensitive matter of old-age

20 Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism, 59. 21 Walder, 44–45. 22 Johnson, “Beneath the Propaganda State,” 199. 23 See the procedures adopted by the State Council on November 24, 1956, “Guowuyuan guanyu sifang renyuan jibing yiliao he bingjia qijian de gongzi daiyu wenti yijian” 国务院关于私方人员疾病医疗和病假期间的工资待遇问题意见 (State Council opinion on the salaries and treatment of private-side personnel for disease, medical treatment, and sick leave). An exception was made for female capitalists who were granted maternity leave on the same conditions as regular state enterprise employees (i.e. eight weeks), regardless of the value of their investments, cf. People’s Daily, September 14, 1957, 1

119 pensions, which state propaganda had raised into a symbol of the prosperity brought to workers under Communist Party rule, until 1962, ﬁve years after it laid down similar proce-

dures for workers and regular staff.24 The ﬁnal outcome was a retirement policy that did not

discriminate on the basis of class identity: capitalists could retire on conditions comparable

to the ones for industrial workers. Yet, even when the separate organization of welfare did

not translate into a hierarchy of material beneﬁts, it marked the capitalists’ liminal position within the workplace.

The work unit’s importance in the life of its employees went beyond the organization

of the work day and even the provision of welfare. It was a site of governance, which

regulated the political participation, education, leisure time, and physical wellbeing of the workforce. In this sense, the Chinese work unit was at the forefront of the global rise of

“industrial citizenship” in the form of unprecedented provision of stable and long-term

employment in the postwar era.25 This was an era that saw a remarkable mitigation of social

inequalities sustained by a worldwide economic boom, but Joel Andreas reminds us that

industrial citizenship was much like national citizenship in that it became effective through

its exclusion.26 In the work unit, the allocation of resources was closely tied to employment

but also to political status. In other words, entitlement was conditioned on membership.

24 See “Guowuyuan guanyu chuli zichanjieji gongshangyezhe tuixiu wenti de buchong guiding” 国务院关于处理资产阶级工商业者退休问题的补充规定 (State Council supplementary regulation on the handling of the issue of old- age pensions for industrialists and merchants), passed on July 7 and reprinted in Tongyi zhanxian,no. 10(August 18, 1962), 3–4. The decision was followed by a supplementary State Council decision in 1964 that extended the retirement procedures to “representative” capitalists on the county-level and above, see SHMA: B23-4-292, 15. Only after drawn-out consideration and increasing demographic pressure did the government ﬁnally take a stance on old-age pensions for capitalists. In the early spring of 1960, Liu Shaoqi recommended to the leaders of the Two Association that capitalists too old, too frail, or too ill to work could simply ask for extended sick leave with retained salary and in April this recommendation was followed by a party directive, see BJMA: 110-001-01361, 49. In March 1962, the Central United Front Department ﬁnally issued an opinion on old-age pension for capitalists which served as the basis for the State Council decision four months later. The document proposed that capitalists should be granted tuixiu 退休 (“old-age retirement”) because a decision that restricted their compensation to tuizhi 退职 (“retirement”) would be (1) inconsistent with other policies; (2) require the state to step in anyway to help households who could not make ends meet; (3) companies would likely abuse tuizhi procedures to get rid of capital-side employees, see “Zhongyang pizhuan zhongyang tongzhanbu guanyu chuli zichanjieji gongshangyezhe tuixiu wenti de yijian” 中央批转中央统战部关于处理资产阶级工商业者退休问题的意见 (The Center comments and transmits the Central United Front Department opinion handling of the issue of old-age pensions for industrialists and merchants). Tongyi zhanxian, no. 3 (March 15, 1962), 2–4 25 See Andreas, Disenfranchised; if this postwar trend was not unique to China, neither did the work unit appear ex nihilo with the transition to the command economy but resembled institutions and practices of wartime China, see Yeh, “Republican Origins of the Danwei.” 26 Andreas, Disenfranchised.

120 This made the question of which entitlements were granted to whom intensely political and the welfare given to capitalists especially controversial.

The failure of capitalist assimilation became all the more consequential because it coincided with the government abandoning a vision of a simpler and more egalitarian system of welfare. The Great Leap Forward in welfare involved a plan to have the people’s communes provide services and beneﬁts on the basis of local needs and resources, in contrast to the status-based entitlements that decided access to pension programs and other welfare provisions offered through the work unit.27 As such, the communal welfare system favored the sans-papiers of the socialist system: the great majority of Chinese who did not have an urban household registration, ﬁrst of all, but also to urban residents without employment or “red passports.” In a short-lived experiment, the cities set up their own communes to bring about an increase in production made possible through a simpler and more egalitarian welfare protection.

In the vision of the urban commune, everybody would participate in labor. The communal provision of welfare, as Fabio Lanza shows, was designed to make possible the submission of its members to an increasingly unbearable amount of work.28 Most importantly, the communal provision of child care, laundry, and canteens, would free up housewives, capitalist and otherwise, for productive labor.29 For capitalist husbands, the reward for all the hard work was the tantalizing prospect of full integration into the community of socialist production when political conduct and contribution to production would take precedence over class labels of rapidly diminishing relevance. Even in the communes, this shift was not as complete as it was made out to be. A report from the Central United Front Work De- partment told of urban communes categorically excluding capitalists from more important positions, essentially treating them as they would landlords and other class enemies.30

27 Dillon, Radical Inequalities, 235. 28 Lanza, “A City of Workers, a City for Workers?” 56. 29 Lanza, 50. 30 “Zhongyang pizhuan zhongyang tongzhanbu guanyu jixu guanche dui zichanjieji renmen anpai zhengce de yijian,” 中央批转中央统战部关于继续贯彻对资产阶级人们安排政策的意见 (The Center comments and transmits the Central United Front Department opinion concerning the continued implementation of the policy to settle bourgeois people). Tongyi zhanxian, no. 4 (April 8, 1961)

121 Only months after Shanghai’s belated implementation of the urban commune program, in March 1960, the city decided to greatly reduce its scope.31 The imposition of new budget constraints led to the closure of childcare centers and communal canteens in 1960–61 and a second round of budget cuts in 1962 brought an end to the provision of welfare subsidies and services through the urban communes.32 In light of the Leap’s failure, the Communist leadership opted to fortify the work unit’s position in the allocation of welfare and to look away as the walls separating the domestic sphere grew thicker and women’s work to maintain the household disappeared once again from ofﬁcial budget sheets. “In many ways,” concludes Nara Dillon, “the mature Maoist welfare state was more a product of failure than of design. The failures of egalitarianism in the Great Leap Forward led to the institutional- ization of a narrow and unequal welfare state in a moment of crisis.”33 As the egalitarian model of communal provision receded, the politics of status and privilege resurged.

3.3 Famine and favor

The Great Leap Forward and its failure accentuated the inequalities of socialism at multiple levels. For the producers of theory, the establishment of communes as the basic unit of organization in both cities and countryside signaled a monumental shift in the development of socialism. Following the Beidahe Conference, in the fall of 1958, the theoretical leap forward came to focus on the question of “bourgeois right” (资产阶级法权 zichan jieji faquan from the German das bürgerliche Recht).34 The year prior, the head of propaganda, Lu Dingyi, had raised the idea that bourgeois right persisted under socialism because distribution was based on work rather than need—meaning that it was consistent with the “principles of commodity exchange of equal values” known from capitalist society—to explain how the system generated incorrect “rightist” attitudes.35 But the communes came with an explicit

31 Dillon, Radical Inequalities, 241–51. 32 Dillon, 252; Lanza, “A City of Workers, a City for Workers?” 53–57. 33 Dillon, Radical Inequalities, 267. 34 For an analysis of the theory of bourgeois right, pieced together from the many contributions to the 1958 debate, see Schoenhals, “Saltationist Socialism,” 128–50. 35 Quoted in Schoenhals, 119.

122 promise that the lingering differentials from old society—notably the differences between workers and peasants, town and countryside, and mental and manual labor—would dis-

appear.36 In a famous article published with Mao’s support, Zhang Chunqiao, a Shanghai

ofﬁcial with a long career as a writer and propagandist, argued that wage differentials and

the piece wage system in particular was a product of the ideology of bourgeois right.37 He

looked to the wartime past for an alternative and argued for reviving the egalitarian supply

system from the revolutionary base areas. Soon thereafter, reports about setbacks tempered

expectations on communization and by the time the scope of the famine had become an un-

deniable reality the theory of bourgeois right was already dead. Yet, the Leap’s descent into

famine in itself demonstrated the system’s inequalities, especially the gap between city and

countryside, to fatal effect. Moreover, the simultaneous failures of the urban communes

and the project to end class meant that status continued to determine the provision of wel-

fare in the cities. As a matter of fact, the political response to the famine came to accentuate

differences based on status.

During the “adjustment” of 1961–1962, the Chinese government put measures in place

to scale back state activities and scale down state institutions. One of the most signiﬁcant

consequences of this retreat was an abrupt halt in the process of urbanization. Over twenty

million had moved from the countryside to the cities in the Great Leap Forward to satisfy

a sharp rise in the demand for industrial labor as factories tried to meet the ambitious pro-

duction targets.38 When the number of grain producers decreased and the number of grain

consumers in the cities increased, the people’s communes had to rapidly increase agricul-

tural output so as to make up for the shortage of labor. The economic planners behind the

adjustment policies believed that the increase in consumers had been a key factor leading

to the famine.39

36 Zhonggong zhongyang, “Guanyu zai nongcun jianli renmin gongshe wenti de jueyi,” 450. 37 Zhang Chunqiao, “Pochu zichanjieji de faquan sixiang” 破除资产阶级的法权思想 (Eradicate the Bourgeois Ideol- ogy of Rights) People’s Daily, November 13, 1958, 7 38 Brown, City Versus Countryside in Mao’s China, 79. 39 Wemheuer, Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union, 230; this view is shared by the economist Chris Bramall who consider the diversion of labor from farming to industry to be a more plausible explanation for the famine than the collectivization itself, see Chinese Economic Development, 130.

123 In late 1960, Mao gave his approval to instructions to “squeeze out all of the labor force that can be squeezed out, and replenish the agricultural front, primarily the grain production front,” which signaled the beginning of a movement to reverse the diversion of labor away from agriculture.40 The movement to “downsize” (精简 jingjian) the urban population and industrial workforce was extraordinary in terms of sheer numbers and sociological impact. Between late 1960 and 1963, the state evacuated 26 million people from the cities.41

In the same period, the non-agrarian population dropped from 20.7 percent to 16.7 percent and remained at this or an even lower level until the 1980s.42 The reduction of the industrial workforce, together with a strict enforcement of household registration, made sure that the vast majority of the Chinese people were excluded from the urban welfare state.

As millions of workers were laid off and sent to the countryside, the party leadership decided to protect capitalists from the effects of its downsizing policy. The decision followed disappointing trials with sending capitalists to the countryside for shorter periods of time.

In 1960, 3,826 capital-side employees went down to the rural outskirts north of Beijing to help dig a canal from the Miyun reservoir that became the capital’s main source of fresh water.43 Others went to work in the ﬁelds of people’s communes, joined state farms, or lent their support to rural distribution centers. When the Beijing Party Committee reviewed the results of the rustication of capitalists, upon request from Premier Zhou Enlai, the ﬁndings were discouraging.

Reporting back to the Premier, Wan Li, the vice mayor of Beijing, portrayed an experiment beset with problems, ranging from sending 74-year-olds to work in the fields to split- ting up families and sending the members to different villages.44 Wan recommended that any future measures to send capitalists to “support agriculture” be carried out in line with a recent opinion from the Central United Front Department, which among other things advised against sending down capitalists indefinitely and specified that they should retain

40 Brown, City Versus Countryside in Mao’s China, 80. 41 Wemheuer, A Social History of Maoist China, 165. 42 Guojia tongjiju, Zhongguo renkou tongji nianjian, 207. 43 BJMA: 002-020-00370 44 BJMA: 002-020-00370

124 their salaries, beneﬁts, and dividends even during their time in the countryside.45 Wan

added that it would be appropriate to carry out a general survey of all capital-side person-

nel who had already been sent down to determine who should be brought back.46 Some of

the capitalists sent down to the countryside in the ﬁrst years of the 1960s, like most people

affected by downsizing in the following years, never returned to the city.47

The decision to exempt capitalists from evacuation followed the broad implementation

of the downsizing policy in 1961. On August 17, following new recommendations from the

Central United Front Department, the Party Center notiﬁed the provinces that the positions

of non-party ofﬁcials and the jobs of capital-side personnel should not be “hastily changed”

and that “during this round of downsizing, democratic personages and capitalist personnel

must not be treated as a burden to be downsized and pushed out.”48 New state regulations

followed clarifying that factories and companies who were forced to cut staff or shut down

due to downsizing measures were nevertheless prohibited from pressuring capital-side per-

sonnel to go down to the countryside.49 If a closing factory lacked the means to ﬁnd a new

position for its capitalist employees, the local government would step in to ﬁnd them jobs while maintaining their salaries at their original level.

Through its protection of capitalists during downsizing, the party leadership showed

a commitment to maintaining the separate identity of this population in opposition to the

more egalitarian tendencies of the Great Leap. The contrast becomes clearer if we return for

a moment to Zhang Chunqiao’s attack on “bourgeois right” to note that he was concerned

45 “Guanyu jingjian xiafang duidai zichanjieji fenzi de yijian” 关于精减下放对待资产阶级分子的意见 (Opinion concerning the treatment of bourgeois elements in the downsizing and sending down), cited in BJMA: 002-020- 00370 46 BJMA: 002-020-00370 47 MLD: 67; cf. Brown, City Versus Countryside in Mao’s China, 78. 48 “Zhongyang pizhuan Zhongyang tongzhanbu guanyu jixu guanche dui zichanjieji renmen anpai zhengce de yijian” 中央批转中央统战部关于继续贯彻对资产阶级人们安排政策的意见 (The Center comments and transmits the Central United Front Work Department opinion on continuing to carry out the settling of persons of the bourgeoisie). Tongyi zhanxian gongzuo, April 8, 1961; reprinted in Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi, Jianguo yilai zhongyao wenxian xuanbian 14: 571–5. The protection extended to other targets of United Front Work such as Chinese who had returned from overseas following the founding of the People’s Republic of China, as per “Guowuyuan pizhuan Zhongqiaowei guanyu dangqian qiaowu gongzuo zhong ji ge wenti de baogao” (State Council comments and transmits the Central Overseas Chinese Affairs Commiteee report on some issues of current overseas Chinese affairs), July 26, 1960, cited in SHMA: A62-2-17, 178 49 MLD: 1023

125 specifically with a type of thinking that lingered on from old society but that he did not associate with the capitalists, nor any other class, specifically. Although Zhang would rise to prominence in the Cultural Revolution as an avid proponent of class struggle, the radical posture he adopted in the Great Leap was one of bold advances. The idea that China could break away from its reactionary past through collective effort to which he subscribed made him and others treat bourgeois thinking as an affliction of the mind and downplay its connection to class status. The radical argument against privilege followed logically from the position that China was on the verge of overcoming the contradictions of the past.

By opposition, to insist on the continued differentiation on the basis of class became the principle of the party’s policy toward the national bourgeoisie in times of adjustment.

In the winter of 1959–1960, high-ranking members of the Two Associations convened for a “meeting of immortals” in Beijing.50 This marathon meeting lasted for sixty-eight days and it was presented, in the wake of the purge of rightists and the rectiﬁcation movement of recent years, as a forum in which capitalists could voice their concerns without fear of repercussions. One of the Minjian’s founding members likened the meeting to a tai chi session: it would involve some sweating, but no force.51 Featuring speeches by several

Communist Party’ leaders over the ﬁnal days of the meeting, it also became a venue to present the party’s policy toward the capitalists in the era of perpetual assimilation. The highest-level intervention came from the recently appointed President of China Liu Shaoqi who insisted that whether it was old age, illness, or other forms of hardship the state would guarantee the welfare needs of all capitalists loyal to socialism and the party.52

In response to concerns about wage reform and lost beneﬁts in the Leap’s reorganization of the welfare state, the party assured the capitalists that they would retain their unique entitlements. At the “meeting of the immortals,” Xu Bing, the vice director of the Central

50 Zhonghua quanguo gongshangye lianhehui jianshi bianxiezu, Zhonghua quanguo gongshangye lianhehui jianshi, 89–91. 51 “Liang hui ruogan lingdaoren dui kai ‘shenxian hui’ de fanying xuzhi” 两会若干领导人对开 “神仙会” 的反映续志 (Further reﬂections from the leaders of the Two Associations on convening the “meeting of immortals”). Lingxun, no. 157 (December 10, 1959), 5 52 Zhonghua quanguo gongshangye lianhehui jianshi bianxiezu, 90.

126 United Front Department, promised that the state would continue to pay out ﬁxed-rate dividends, while leaving it to the recipients to decide whether they wished to collect, and that the system of retention salaries would stay the same.53 In addition, bourgeois representatives and other non-party ofﬁcials would retain their positions in the government and the People’s Consultative Conference; the same went for university professors and state researchers. Nor would there be any fundamental change to the program of thought reform.

Summed up as the “ﬁve constants” (五不变 wu bu bian), the policy guaranteed entitlements at the expense of the prospect of assimilation. Welfare guarantees required the preservation of capitalist identity, and the preservation of capitalist identity necessitated the welfare guarantees—the process worked both ways.

Why did the Communist Party protect capitalists from downsizing and provide welfare guarantees in the context of austerity and a general retreat of the welfare state? Some capitalists interpreted it as a conﬁrmation that behind the veneer of ideological hostility the political leadership continued to see the value of their skills and knowledge. When it became clear that downsizing would not affect them, capitalists in the Jiangsu Province captured the discrepancy between party rhetoric and state action in a short verse:

The working class—fragrant, fragrant, oh so fragrant

forced to pack up and head down to the countryside

The bourgeoisie—stinky, stinky, oh so stinky

yet not a single one has had to go away54

The Jiangsu capitalists took comfort in the idea that their preferential treatment meant that the Communist Party continued to value them. In its communication toward the bourgeoisie, through the channels of the United Front, the party bolstered the capitalists’ self- image by repeating that the latter possessed skills that remained relevant even under socialism. But even if party leaders would have agreed that they still needed the “coordination of human effort and material resources toward the achievement of organizational

53 Liu, “Bao yi tou,” 2011, 14. 54 Quoted in Liu, 17.

127 objectives,”55 they had little reason to assume that the capitalist status would be a reliable indicator for the type of expertise required for the operation of a large state enterprise in a command economy. None of the reasons usually cited for why the Communist Party opted for a strategy of cooperation with the bourgeoisie and worked so hard to recruit capitalists in the early days of the People’s Republic applied to the highly diverse population labelled as capitalist after socialist transition. Just how poor a proxy the capitalist label was for managerial skills became clear with the ﬁrst survey of this population in 1963.

3.4 The demography of a stratiﬁed class

The theoretical premise of the Communist Party’s policy toward the national bourgeoisie will be sufficiently clear at this point. In a sentence, it can be summed up as the idea that a distinct demography existed under socialism whose social function was still determined to a significant extent by its historical position in the capitalist system of production. The efficiency of such a policy once put into practice, however, depended not so much on theoretical understanding of its object as on the quality of the data on the composition and conditions of the capitalist population. In order to estimate the impact of the State Council’s

1962 decision on old-age pensions for capitalists, to take just one example, the government would have had to have an idea about the age structure of the corresponding population.

In this respect, there was precious little to go on. The census of 1953 had covered five items thought to be relevant for effective government—name, sex, age, nationality, and relationship to head of household—but collected no information about class. Although a considerable amount of data had been produced in socialist transition, it had been limited to the assets and incomes of capital-side personnel and their positions within the public-private joint management firms. The concern had not been with the management of the capitalist population. It was only in 1962 that the Federation of Industry and Commerce began planning the first census of the country’s capitalists for the sake of assisting the government in

55 Richman, Industrial Society in Communist China, 72.

128 times of downsizing and welfare reforms.56

Over the next two years, the Federation’s members temporarily took on the role of cen-

sus takers and, with support from the Minjian’s local branches and under the oversight of

the Communist Party’s United Front organs, began collecting data on the capitalist pop-

ulation. The Federation decided that the survey would initially be limited to twelve ma-

jor cities—Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Shenyang, Xi’an, Chongqing, Wuhan, Guangzhou,

Hangzhou, Jinan, and Harbin—and left open to its branches in other cities to decide for

themselves whether to participate.57

The questionnaire used for the survey was a considerably more elaborate than the one

used for the regular population census. Where the questionnaire used in the 1953 census

had only included ﬁve items, the Federation’s form had no less than twenty-seven ques-

tions, covering topics ranging from basic attributes (e.g. age, level of education, and pro-

fession), to those relevant only for members of an educated elite (e.g. books authored or

translated, spare-time activities and personal interests), and others related to the capitalists’

speciﬁc entitlements (e.g. salary including retention salary and price of assets at the time

of public-private mergers) and recent policies (e.g. personal situation following downsiz-

ing measures).58 Such items reﬂected the managerial logic behind the survey: the capitalist

population could be a resource but to exploit it efﬁciently required detailed knowledge as

to the quality of this workforce (measured in levels of education, special skills and so on)

and the needs that would have to be met to sustain its capacity (expressed by indicators of welfare needs such as health, age, sex, and income).

Who were counted in the Federation’s census? Or, to rephrase the question, how was the capitalist population delineated? The Federation offered a formal deﬁnition:

the bourgeoisie, which it referred to as “bourgeois industrialists and merchants,” was

made up of capitalists, capitalist agents—i.e. members of management at the time of

56 SHMA: C48-2-2482 57 SHMA: C48-2-2482, 1. Although it is unclear how many places decided to carry out their own tallies, there were at least one province, Jiangsu, that did so on a provincial level, see Liu, “Bao yi tou,” 2011, 18. 58 SHMA: C48-2-2482, 5

129 the public-private mergers—, and other private-side personnel receiving dividends.59

These three types shared two basic features: their incorporation into the socialist system coincided with the creation of public-private joint management firms and so they had a claim to a fixed-rate dividend corresponding to the price set on their asset during the transition. The consequence of this definition was that the census allowed for an arbitrary distinction to be made, respondents could choose between the three varieties of bourgeois industrialists and merchants, without imposing any functional distinction between the capitalist population and the population of dividend recipients.

Short of systematic class assignment, there existed no reliable mechanism to separate the dividend recipients who qualiﬁed as capitalists from those who did not. The year before the Federation of Industry and Commerce began preparations for its survey, the Central

United Front Department had explained, in an attempt to clear up some terminological confusion, that while it was true in principle that only members of the bourgeoisie could be beneficiaries of the Redemption Policy, there had been “no work to determine class status among them in the past” and consequently an unspecified number of small merchants and peddlers—or, in class terms, members of the petty bourgeoise—had seen their business swallowed up in the creation of public-private joint management firms and therefore also collected dividend payments.60 This conflation also explains why Barry Richman, the

Canadian management specialist, was told by his informants that there were about 300,000 dividend recipients in China when he asked about the number of capitalists.61 At the time of Richman’s visit to China, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, his hosts did not have the tools nor the motivation to provide a more exact answer (on the events that changed this, see Chapter 5).

On December 31, 1963, the Shanghai FIC began compiling the numbers collected in the city’s twelve districts. In total, it counted 98,694 bourgeoisie industrialists and merchants

59 SHMA: C48-2-2482, 2 60 “Zenyang jieshi you dingxi de sifang renyuan?” 怎样解释有定息的私方人员？(How to explain private-side personnel with ﬁxed-rate dividends?). Tongyi zhanxian gongzuo, no. 10 (October 26, 1961) 61 Richman, Industrial Society in Communist China, 894.

130 Table 3.1: Bourgeois industrialists and merchants by type, Shanghai 1963

Status Capitalists Capitalist agents Other dividend recipients Dependents

Working 45,504 3972 9903 35,786

Non-working 6725 350 595 48,205

Total 52,229 4322 10,498 83,991 Modiﬁed from SHMA: C48-1-202, Table 1 and Table 4

living in Shanghai.62 Save some seven thousand in the surrounding counties, all lived in

the urban districts. In line with the All-China FIC’s deﬁnition, the numbers from Shanghai

divide the bourgeoise into capitalists, capitalist agents, and “other” recipients of dividends

(Table 3.1). The “other” category were for private-side personnel who did not ﬁt into the

other two groups and whose class identity was unclear: it consisted of a motley crew of

persons who had been employed in public-private or state-run enterprises under irregu-

lar circumstances following the restructuring or closure of their businesses during socialist

transition. The Shanghai FIC counted about ten thousand in this category, some of whom

collected meager dividend payments but most of whom did not.63

Since the policy toward the national bourgeoisie affected not just individuals but en-

tire households, it was important to count the number of capitalist spouses and children as well (Table 3.1). In the organization and mobilization of capitalist dependents, there was

a clear presumption that the capitalist household was led by a patriarch whose wife was

left tending to the home. Christopher Leighton, among others, even translates the Chinese word jiashu liberally as housewife with the motivation that ofﬁcial documents “constantly

and consistently” use the term to denote “speciﬁcally the wife of a capitalist, rather than

his children or parents, and connoted a woman of privilege who had no professional po-

sition of her own, and in most cases did not hold a post in mass organizations.”64 It goes

62 SHMA: C48-1-202, Table 1; C48-2-2324, 80 63 C48-1-202, 15 64 Leighton, “Capitalists, Cadres, and Culture,” 139–40; the same holds true for the ofﬁcial discourse on jiashu in general, cf. Song, “The State Discourse on Housewives and Housework in the 1950s in China.”

131 Table 3.2: Bourgeois industrialists and merchants by sex and age, Shanghai 1963

Sex Age Population of total

Male <35 5497 0.07

36-45 21,437 0.29

46-60 35,563 0.48

>61 11,204 0.15

All ages 73,701 1.00

Female <35 3944 0.16

36-45 10,283 0.41

46-55 7448 0.30

>56 3318 0.13

All ages 24,993 1.00 Modified from SHMA: C48-1-202, Table 1 without saying that the conflation of dependent and housewife followed from the fact that men filled the role of the capitalist on the silver screen and on the political scene. The FIC’s census revealed the degree to which this political and cultural assumption was mistaken.

In Shanghai, as many as one fourth of the capitalist population was female. This had immediate policy implications, not least because a large minority of the female capitalists were close to reaching or had already reached ﬁfty-ﬁve, the age when a woman could retire (Table

3.2). At ﬁfteen percent, the proportion of male dependents was smaller but still signiﬁcant.65

Just as with the capitalists, there was thus a dissonance between the mental image of the dependent and the population that ﬁt into this category. Notably, many dependents, both men and women, had professional positions of their own: forty-two percent of Shanghai’s capitalist dependents were part of the labor force. For the men, the ratio was even higher.

In Huangpu district, for example, seven out of ten male dependents had regular jobs.66

Through the collection of income data, the census gave evidence to the gap that separated the tiny elite that represented the bourgeoisie in institutions on the provincial or

65 SHMA: C48-1-202, 18 66 SHMA: C48-1-202, 18

132 national level from the much greater number of people affected by the politics of capitalist segregation. This gap manifested itself in two ways. First, the inequality in terms of absolute income was considerable. More than one ﬁfth of Shanghai’s bourgeois industrialists and merchants earned less than ﬁfty yuan per month, meaning that despite retention salaries they earned less than the average state-employed worker in the city who had a monthly salary of seventy yuan in 1963 (see Appendix A).67 The majority earned less than one hundred yuan and only the top one percent had a salary of over three hundred (Table

3.3). Even in a socialist society where consumer goods were relatively scarce, the income gap translated into marked differences in the patterns of consumption. While many capitalists struggled to make ends meet, members of a wealthy elite kept servants and rode in imported cars.

Material comfort correlated with position within the institutional framework of the

United Front. For high-level members of the Two Associations, institutional privilege was added to income from salaries and dividends.68 To take an extreme example, Vice Premier

Xi Zhongxun recommended, also in 1962, that the 101 top ofﬁcials of the democratic parties receive a monthly allowance of 15 jin (7.5 kilos) of fresh fruit per person.69 The differences remained signiﬁcant further down the hierarchy. The Shanghai census showed that expenditure per family member of a member of the FIC’s executive committee (48.2 yuan) was almost three times the capitalist population’s average (17.6 yuan) and even between the average household and that of a member of the FIC’s district-level committees (25.2 yuan) there was a noticeable gap.70 More than active state support, it was the Communist Party’s deliberate strategy to recruit prominent capitalists as representatives for the bourgeoisie that explains the hierarchical differences of household incomes.

Most striking were the differences in income from dividends. In the 1963 survey, one

67 SHMA: C48-1-202, Table 3 68 In his study of the lifestyles of Shanghai’s wealthiest capitalists in the 1950s and 1960s, Lu Hanchao notes active and passive support through the institutions of the United Front but it remains unclear how this reality if compatible with his argument that luxury consumption constituted a form of resistance vis-a-vis the state, Lu, “Bourgeois Comfort Under Proletarian Dictatorship.” 69 Guojia jiguan shiwu guanli, 251 70 SHMA: C48-2-2432, 10

133 Table 3.3: Bourgeois industrialists and merchants by dividends and salaries, Shanghai 1963

Salary / month 300 Total

Persons 74,897 19,518 3211 997 98,623 of total 0.76 0.20 0.03 0.01 1

Dividend/year None RMB2500 Total

Persons 34,069 40,612 15,241 6757 2015 98,694 of total 0.35 0.41 0.15 0.07 0.02 1 Modiﬁed from SHMA: C48-1-202, Table 3 third of the respondents in Shanghai reported no such income at all whereas the top two percent received—before a ten percent deduction, the function of which will become clear below—over 2,500 yuan (Table 3.3). Shanghai’s forty-seven wealthiest capitalists collected between 25,000 and 50,000 yuan per year.71 Consequently, the gap between rich and humble also manifested itself in terms of the relative importance of dividends as a source of income.

For the vast majority, it represented just a few percent of their annual income but for the wealthy elite the dividend payments outweighed their salaries.72

Set apart from the rest of the urban community, the capitalist was either overprivileged or underprivileged. The 1963 census demonstrated with great clarity the gap between a doubly favored elite—protected as high-ranking members of United Front institutions and with incomes that vastly surpassed all other groups in socialist China—and a doubly dis- advantaged population, who suffered the stigma and exclusion that came with class status and whose household income was lower than that of an average worker. The need for precise data on the income and demography of capitalist households responded to the decision to preserve the segregation of this population and to extend dividends.

71 SHMA: C48-2-2342, 72 72 National ﬁgures from the ﬁrst half of 1956 show that the top one percent (with investments valued at above 50,000 yuan) earned between 55.67 and 88.84 percent of their income from dividends as compared to only 4.67 percent for the seventy percent whose investment were valued at 2000 yuan or below, see Zhong- gong zhongyang dangshi ziliao zhengji weiyuanhui and Zhonggong zhongyang tongzhanbu, ZZGSYSG (Zhongyang), 1388.

134 3.5 The economic organization of difference

On March 28, 1962, when reporting on the government’s work to the National People’s

Congress, Premier Zhou Enlai announced that the payment of ﬁxed-rate dividends would continue for another three years. He justiﬁed the prolongation of dividends in terms of needs: some people, he said, had not made the necessary preparations for the transition.73

The Premier’s announcement did not come as a surprise. Over the past couple of years, the political leadership had hinted that an extension was on the table.74 One of the ﬁrst to discreetly propose such an extension was Deng Wenzhao, a former bank manager who had been instrumental in soliciting support for the early Communist regime among the business and ﬁnancial circles in Hong Kong. In discussion with the capitalist expert Xu Dixin, on the sidelines of the 1959/60 meeting of immortals, he suggested that another three years of payouts would create goodwill among capitalists, who would in turn put more effort into their work.75 Moreover, displaying such generosity would improve the regime’s image abroad, especially as it would have a positive impact on the lives of the many capitalists of

Deng’s home province of Guangdong who had close ties across the border to Hong Kong.

Motives of this type were cited for most decisions that would affect the policies of the United

Front, but Zhou’s comments suggested a more speciﬁc rationale was at play.

Shortly after the announcement, a government transfer of three million yuan to the Fed-

73 Zhonghua quanguo gongshangye lianhehui jianshi bianxiezu, Zhonghua quanguo gongshangye lianhehui jianshi, 95. 74 Here, one should note that the end of dividends had never been really clear to begin with. In early 1956, a few weeks before the State Council took the formal decision on fixed-rate dividends, Mao said that one had to wait to see how the situation developed before deciding on when the “tail” of dividends should be “cut off,” see Mao, “Zai zhishi fenzi wenti huiyi shang de jianghua.”, 83. Later that year, two days before his sixty-third birthday, he wrote a comment to Chen Shutong and Chen Yun that it would take “at least” seven years before the state would stop paying dividends, Mao, “Guanyu shehui zhuyi gaizao wancheng wenti de piyu.”, footnote 2. Further comments from the party leadership at this time were taken as confirmation that the state would wait until the end of the Second Five Year Plan in 1962 to cancel dividends, see for example “Shanghai gongshangjie dui dingxi qi nian he zhai maozi wenti de fanying” 上海工商界对定息七年和摘帽子问题的反应 (Shanghai’s industrialists and merchants reacts to the issues of the seven-year fixed-rate dividend and the removal of labels); “Shanghai bufen heying qiye zhigong dui liu nian bu qu dingxi de fanying” 上海部分合营企业职工对六年不取消定息的反应 (A portion of the staff in Shanghai’s joint management firms reacts to the decision not to cancel fixed-rate dividends within six years), both in Neibu cankao December 15 and 29, 1956 75 “Deng Wenzhao de ji dian yijian he fanying” 邓文钊的几点意见和反映 (A few opinions and reflections from Deng Wenzhao). Lingxun , no. 157 (December 10, 1959)

135 eration of Industry and Commerce to help capitalists living under strained circumstances gave an idea of what the Premier had meant by insufﬁcient preparations.76 A cancellation of dividend payments would further aggravate the situation. In Shanghai, the FIC sorted the city’s seventeen thousand poorest dividend recipients into four groups:

• Group 1 could not cover household expenses without dividends but if their

spouses/children found employment they could handle the cancellation of divi-

dends. Population: 634

• Group 2 could not cover household expenses without dividends and either did not

have a spouses/children who could be employed or would not be able to cover house-

hold expenses even if spouses/children found employment. Population: 5291.

• Group 3 could not cover household expenses even with dividends but if their

spouses/children found employment they could handle the cancellation of divi-

dends. Population: 871

• Group 4 could not cover household expenses even with dividends and either did not

have a spouses/children who could be employed or would not be able to cover house-

hold expenses even if spouses/children found employment. Population: 10,333.77

For the fourth and by far largest group, the cancellation of dividend payments would lead to “livelihood difficulties” (生活困难 shenghuo kunnan) that could not be solved by em- ploying members of their household. In a precursor to the larger surveys, a team of party officials, who had conducted an in situ investigation of the conditions of private-side employees at the Tianjin Bazaar in the country’s third largest city, similarly found that a cancellation of dividend payments would place twenty-five percent of employed capitalists and their families in “livelihood difficulties” and as many as half of the unemployed capitalists would face the same situation.78 The notion of “difficulties,” in the team’s usage as in the

76 Zhonghua quanguo gongshangye lianhehui jianshi bianxiezu, Zhonghua quanguo gongshangye lianhehui jianshi, 95. 77 SHMA: C48-2-2342, 12 78 “Guanyu jinxing dingxi wenti diaocha yanjiu gongzuo de ji dian tihui” 关于进行定息问题调查研究工作的几点体会 (A few experiences from having conducted investigation and research into the question of ﬁxed-rate

136 statistics from Shanghai, was deﬁned not in absolute terms but relative to expectations that came with class identity:

So-called livelihood difﬁculties after the cancellation of dividends, refer to dif-

ﬁculties maintaining current bourgeois living standards after ’62 on the basis

of wage income, savings, and government bonds of the person in question and

their dependents. It does not refer to the living standards required for the ordi-

nary toiling people. It also does not include persons who could maintain their

lifestyle after ’62 by selling things or supplementing household income if their

children were employed, because the political effects of selling things are not

good and having children supplement household income through employment

is unreliable.79

Hardship, in other words, was to be evaluated against a standard that predated socialism. For many capitalist families, hardship clearly meant living in poverty but for a handful this definition helped protect privilege lifestyles and material comforts. In late 1959, as famine plagued the nation, Deng Wenzhao, the bank manager who had become a spokesper- son for the bourgeoise, spoke not only of the fear, shared by all, not to be able to get a hold of food, but also about a more particular concern: “for the most part industrialists and merchants own big houses, but cannot find cleaning staff.”80 Seven years later the Rong household found themselves in similar difficulties following a reduction of its income to just three hundred yuan per month of which one third went to pay the wages of the family’s housekeeper, chef, and private driver.81 Such “hardships” were unimaginable for the great majority of the capitalist population.

dividends). Tongyi zhanxian gongzuo, no. 4 (April 8, 1961), 3. The team’s investigation was a showcase for the party’s revival of the rural surveys conducted in the 1930s, prompted by Mao’s growing dissatisfaction with the bureaucratic process of intelligence gathering and knowledge production in the wake of the famine. In January 1961, Mao called for a revival of a mode of operation in which decisions were based on fact-finding and grassroots investigation. A couple of months later he conveniently happened upon an article he had written in 1930 in criticism of dogmatism and favor of in situ investigation, which was swiftly made available for the first time for party officials at the county/regiment level and above, see Office, “Mao Zedong on Investigation and Research.” 79 “Guanyu jinxing dingxi wenti diaocha yanjiu gongzuo de ji dian tihui,” 7 80 “Deng Wenzhao de ji dian yijian he fanying,” 7 81 Ji, Rong Yiren, 188.

137 The Tianjin investigation report, which the Central United Front Department lauded as exemplary and transmitted to cities and towns around the country, gave an impression of how broad the administrative impact of a cancellation of dividends would be. Work units would have to make place for capitalist children, thousands of whom would have to be called back from the countryside, in times of downsizing and authorities who were already struggling with the unregistered vending of household goods might see an increase of black market activities.82 The Tianjin investigators stressed that the problem was not just one of settling “economic accounts” but “political accounts” too. With the cancellation of dividends, the capitalists would want to go from “half members of the family” to “full members of the family” or, in other words, have their class labels removes.83 Here, the report pointed to something that many of the party ofﬁcials working with the national bourgeoisie would surely have known already: it was not possible to disentangle dividend payments from capitalist class identity.

In the early days of capitalist remolding, the Communist Party cited two obstacles standing in the way of capitalists becoming full members of the people: the ideological obstacle that was their lingering bourgeois mindset and the material obstacle that was the dividends.84 Through the economic organization of the capitalist population as collective benefactors of the Redemption Policy, the state reiﬁed this discursive association between entitlement and identity. It became collective because even the most exposed capitalists, who received no dividend payments nor any retention salary, were entitled to support from the

FIC’s Mutual Assistance Fund in times of hardship.

Just as workers could apply to trade unions for relief in times of need, capitalists could

82 While some children were coming back, others were going away. In 1963, there were still nearly nine thousand children of capitalists working either in factories outside of Shanghai or in the countryside, see SHMA: C48-1- 202-1. Of these, one and a half thousand were living in Xinjiang as part of a special program for the educated youth, cf. “Shanghai Huangpu quwei tongzhanbu guanyu tuidong zichanjieji renmen zhichi zinü canjia Xin- jiang jianshe gongzuo zhong de tihui” 上海黄浦区委统战部关于推动资产阶级人们支持子女参加新疆建设工作中的体会 (The experiences of the Shanghai Huangpu District Committee United Front Department with pushing bourgeoise people to back their children’s participation in the Xinjiang construction work). Tongyi zhanxian gongzuo, no. 16 (September 15, 1964), 9-13 83 “Guanyu jinxing dingxi wenti diaocha yanjiu gongzuo de ji dian tihui,” 7 84 Feng, “Shenfen, yishi yu zhengzhi,” 33.

138 turn to the Industrialist and Merchant Livelihood Mutual Assistance Fund.85 Operated

through the Federation of Industry and Commerce, the fund was the core of the separate

organization of capitalist welfare. Only when the stress on the fund was too great, as was

the case in 1962, would the government step in and provide supplementary funds.86 And

even then, the Mutual Aid Fund was in charge of administering the beneﬁts. The fund

dated back to 1956, when the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce instructed its

branches across the country to provide relief to capitalists and managers who were not im-

mediately assigned new jobs when their businesses were swallowed by large public-private

joint management ﬁrms or simply declared bankrupt in the process of socialist transition.

Additionally, the fund would help households whose income or savings were not sufﬁcient

to cover medical expenses or loss of salary for those too ill or old to keep working.87

The idea was simple: capital-side personnel handed over one percent from every salary

and ten percent of every dividend payment to the local Mutual Assistance Fund (see Figure

3.1). The collected funds were managed by a committee set up by the Federation and which

had the power to issue relief to families in difﬁculty either in form of a beneﬁt or a loan.88

In Shanghai, the Mutual Aid Fund was headed by Wang Xingyao, a Ningbo manager who had coordinated the boycott of Japanese goods and relief efforts during the war and

more recently been appointed vice chairman of the Shanghai FIC.89 In the war, the partic-

ipation in relief programs and civic associations had been a way for the bankers and busi-

nesspeople of Shanghai to demonstrate their patriarchal concern for the well-being of the

people and thereby legitimized wealth that was private, yes, but shared with the family-

nation.90 By limiting redistribution to the capitalists themselves, the mutual aid under so-

cialism became a means to set this population apart. The state, through the workplace and

85 Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism, 201. 86 “Chen Shutong tongzhi guanyu gongshangjie tuixiu, tuizhi he shenghuo kunnan de fanying” 陈叔同志关于工商界退休、退职和生活困难问题的反映 (Comrade Chen Shutong reacts to the issues of old-age pensions, retirement, and livelihood difﬁculties among industrialists and merchants). Lingxun no. 169 (December 31, 1959) 87 Liu, “Jiuji yu gaizao,” 2007, 65–6. 88 Liu, 66. 89 Xiao-Planes, “La Shanghai Civic Association.” 90 Yeh, Shanghai Splendor, 152–3.

139 the union, assumed the role of the patriarch attending to the needs of the workers; the capitalists were left to themselves. The State Council’s transfer of three million yuan to the

All-China FIC was a reminder that this arrangement was only sustainable so long as the

Mutual Aid Fund’s income from dividends could cover the expenditures.

The administrators of Mutual Aid Fund were responsible for deciding who could receive assistance and under what circumstances. For Wang’s committee, it was one of the

ﬁrst items on the agenda. Following the national guidelines, Shanghai’s Mutual Aid Fund counted among its recipients private-side personnel of all kinds as well as shareholders in public-private joint management ﬁrms who had not immediately been assigned a position during the socialist transition. But the committee also reserved the authority to decide on individual cases, which was especially important during the early confusion that followed the public-private mergers when many people found themselves temporarily out of a job or falling in between schemes of welfare provision.91 For reasons that will be familiar by now,

Wang’s committee saw no feasible way to distinguish between capitalists and small-scale proprietors, nor did it consider it imperative.92 Instead, the recommendation was to look at the concrete circumstances: there was no need to provide relief to a household that had been used to living at ten yuan per person and month before 1956 just because some capitalists required far more to keep up their living standards.93 Only by joining the union and having their class status changed would a capitalist—at that point a former capitalist—become ineligible for relief through the Mutual Aid Fund.94

Between May 1957 and June 1961, the Shanghai Mutual Aid Fund recorded 396,171 individual payments to households in need.95 Shanghai was the home of a large number of dividend recipients and some of the country’s wealthiest capitalists, which made its mutual aid fund one of the richest, if not the richest, in the country; only provinces like Jiangsu and

91 SHMA: C48-2-2348, 1 92 SHMA: C48-2-2348, 30 93 SHMA: C48-2-2348, 30 94 SHMA: C48-2-2348, 7 95 SHMA: C48-2-2887, 30

140 Guangdong could compare.96 As a result, the Shanghai fund operated with a large surplus

in the ﬁrst few years. It collected close to twenty-one million yuan from dividends in the

four years from 1956 to 1961 and only spent about ﬁve and a half million on relief.97 Out

of this, almost the entire sum went to help struggling capitalists and retired shareholders with the remaining few percent being allocated to assist peddlers and other quasi-capitalist

types who would otherwise have fallen between the safety nets. Of the remaining ﬁfteen

and a half million, two ﬁfths went to the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce

in Beijing. And so a part of the wealth of Shanghai’s most afﬂuent industrialists was redis-

tributed to sustain the population of capitalists throughout the nation.

Figure 3.1: Shanghai Mutual Aid Fund receipt from July 1966 (facsimile)

When working as intended, the mutual aid fund offered temporary relief for momen-

tary setbacks. It assured a minimal standard of living for members of a household or could

96 Liu, “Jiuji yu gaizao,” 2007, 66. 97 SHMA: C48-2-2887, 30

141 cover one-time expenses related to childbirth, purchase of certain medicines, and death.98

The model case would have looked like that of Mr. Wang, a capitalist who collected sixty yuan per month in old-age pension since his retirement from the Shanghai No. 9 Radio

Factory. Of his four children who had been sent down to the countryside during the downsizing, one had recently returned to Shanghai but had yet to ﬁnd a job. Wang asked the

Shanghai Federation of Industry and Commerce to help his family for three months. Once granted assistance, he did not sit idle but helped his son look in the papers for openings and accompanied him to browse the job listings posted at an exhibition hall recently built to honor Shanghai’s favorite army division. When the son managed to ﬁnd an opening, he immediately notiﬁed the Federation to cancel the rest of the payment.99

Not all problems were as quick to solve as those of Mr. Wang. In the 1960s, pressure on the Shanghai Mutual Aid Fund grew as many of the city’s capitalists quickly became too old and too frail to work. As a consequence, income from salaries dropped and, more importantly, the number of people in need of ﬁnancial assistance grew. Four problem groups accounted for a majority of the Shanghai Mutual Aid Fund’s expenses: in addition capitalists who were on extended sick leave, waiting for a job placement, or had retired there were the children who, like Mr. Wang’s son, found themselves without a job upon returning home from the countryside.100 By June 1963, there were 6521 retired capitalists in Shanghai of whom 414 were in need of regular payments from the Mutual Aid Fund.101 Both the number of capitalists in retirement and on extended sick leave increased each month, leading to a sharp increase in both the number of households in need and the sums spent on relief.102

In response to the growing need, the central government not only decided to extend dividends but guaranteed that capitalists would continue to receive payments when factories closed down, allowed companies to budget dividend payments as deﬁcits, and de-

98 Shanghai gongshang shetuan zhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Shanghai gongshang shetuan zhi, 538–9. 99 SHMA: C48-2-2887, 178 100 SHMA: C48-2-2887, 176 101 SHMA: C48-2-2887, 176 102 SHMA: C48-2-2887, 224

142 clared that dividends should take precedent over paying back loans.103 It also addressed

the undue diversion of mutual aid funds by local governments: between a total of 1958 and

1962 ﬁve million yuan had been diverted across forty-four cities, much of which had been

used to build factories for the Great Leap Forward. The government support reﬂected the

Communist Party’s decision to strengthen the Federation of Industry and Commerce, the

dismantling of which its chairman had considered inevitable just a couple of years prior,

for the sake of keeping the mutual aid system separate from the general welfare state.

3.6 The breakdown of the capitalist realm

The year 1962 marked the end of the idea that China could promptly do away with the

residues of class society in a single sweep. It was the year when Chairman Mao, in the words of Richard Kraus, “placed the class issue squarely on the agenda of the Party.”104 In

Kraus’ inﬂuential account, this was only the culmination of Mao’s gradual revival of class

as a means to explain society’s contradictions and, crucially, dissent within the party. At the

same time, he is clearly reading Mao’s position as foreshadowing the events of the Cultural

Revolution. Similarly, a reading of the Communist Party’s policies toward the national

bourgeoisie through the lens of elite politics offers a familiar periodization: a temporary revival of the United Front in the wake of the Leap followed by a new leftward wind. Gerry

Groot observes that the fundamental tenet of the United Front, that capitalists could trans-

form themselves into members of the toiling people, was dead by the end of 1962.105 Here,

Mao’s new position on class is linked to attacks on the United Front in the mid-1960s which

culminated in the ousting of Li Weihan—the head of the Central United Front Department

since its establishment in the ﬁnal stages of the Civil War—and the shutdown of United

103 “Guowuyuan pizhuan Caizhengbu, Zhongyang gongshang xingzheng guanliju guanyu chuli gongshangjie dingxi he shenghuo huzhujin wenti de yijian” 国务院批转财政部、中央工商行政管理局关于处理工商界定息和生活互助金问题的意见 (State Council comments and transmits the Ministry of Finance and Central Industrial and Commercial Administration Bureau opinion concerning the handling of the issues of industrialists and merchants’ ﬁxed-rate dividends and livelihood mutual aid). Gongshang xingzheng tongbao, no. 216 (June 29, 1962), 1–2 104 Kraus, Class Conﬂict in Chinese Socialism, 78. 105 Groot, Managing Transitions, 94.

143 Front institutions in the Cultural Revolution.106 But when focus shifts from elite contention to politics as wrapped up in bureaucratic process, the revival of class appears not just as a matter of ideology and the agenda no longer seems to have been set by the Chairman alone.

This chapter has found the politics of class and the politics of austerity in the early 1960s to be mutually reinforcing. Mao’s revival of class started out from a newfound pessimism about the nation’s socialist progress and grew into the dialectic without teleology that he spoke of in terms of a “permanent revolution.” In this sense, it was as much a reaction to the Leap’s failure as the politics of adjustment and was logically consistent with state reorganization of society under the constraints of austerity. Whether one studies political discourse or administrative process, it is clear that the message that the bourgeoisie would soon be eliminated as a class—as seen from the party’s statements and makeshift solutions to deal with capitalists in the second half of the 1950s (see Chapter 2)—was replaced in the wake of the Leap by the message that its transformation would not be completed in the foreseeable future.107 What scholars who conceive of party politics as elite contention alone fail to note is that welfare policies in times of adjustment created the conditions for maintaining the capitalists as a liminal population. They attribute the failure of assimilation to the attacks on United Front policies without acknowledging how the United Front itself became a prison that held the capitalists in perpetual ambivalence.

At a time when the state was scaling back the welfare state, the architects of economic policy were disinclined to bring further stress by discontinuing the entitlements that allowed the capitalist population to maintain itself separately from the regular system. They were just as reluctant to sap the cities of the managerial expertise of capital-side personnel and could not feasibly segregate useful capitalists from useless ones. Thus, the organization of welfare gave concrete meaning to class differences which in turn became the rationale for differences in entitlements; the loop could only be broken by an external shock.

The Cultural Revolution would provide the necessary bombshell, but not before the

106 Groot, 94–95. 107 Cf. Groot, 94.

144 State Council prolonged the payment of dividends for a second time on March 6, 1966. The new extension came without a speciﬁed end date and with the motivation that it would

“beneﬁt ideological transformation among industrialists and merchants” and “take care of the portion among them living under strained circumstances.”108 The unspeciﬁed period of time turned out to be far shorter than the State Council could have predicted. By the end of the month, Mao had widened the criticism against the historian Wu Han and his play Hai

Rui Dismissed from Office into a collective assault on the party organization in Beijing—it was the first salvo of the Cultural Revolution.109 By the end of the summer, students had banded together into Red Guard groups and with Mao’s encouragement set out to “bombard the headquarters” and rebel against all that was old and corrupt.110 It was the mobilization from below rather than the conflicts within the party elite that finally generated enough momentum to put an end to the dividends.

For the Red Guards, the dividends became a symbol of an awkward arrangement that allowed the exploiters of old to live in unparalleled comfort in what was nominally a workers’ state. The young students at Beijing No. 26 Middle School listed the abolishment of dividends as the twenty-third entry on their list of “One Hundred Items for Destroying the

Old and Establishing the New”:

Our nation has already been established for seventeen years. But those who

drank the blood of the people and oppressed the people before the Liberation,

those bourgeois bastards, are still collecting ﬁxed interests [dingxi] and interests

from stocks [guxi] and living the lives of parasites. We warn you: Immediately

desist from collecting ﬁxed interests and interest from stocks; you are only al-

lowed to honestly reform your bastard ideology—you are not permitted to ex-

ploit the people.111

108 “Guanyu yanchang dingxi de wenti” 关于延长定息的问题 (On the matter of extending ﬁxed-rate dividends). Gongshang xingzheng tongbao no. 7 (April 15, 1966), 15 109 Leese, Die chinesische Kulturrevolution, 14; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 32. 110 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 90. 111 Translated in Schoenhals, China’s Cultural Revolution, 215.

145 Big-character posters appeared outside of the entrances to Shanghai’s banks calling for the abolishment of interests and conﬁscation of bank deposits over one thousand yuan and

Red Guards harassed and beat up clients who admitted to being capitalists or small proprietors.112 On Nanjing Road, students from the city’s top middle schools forced dividends- recipients to sign a declaration that they were “voluntarily” relinquished their payouts.113

Faced with mounting pressure from below, Premier Zhou conceded, while speaking with an assembly of Red Guards on September 1, that the time had come to abolish dividends.114 Not even six months had passed since his government had announced the extension of the policy. At the same time, the institutions that had made possible the separate organization of the capitalist population were coming under attack both from Red Guards and from within the party. Overshadowed by the dramatic attacks on Liu Shaoqi at the Com- munist Party’s Eleventh Plenum, the new director of the Central United Front Department, the same Xu Bing who had announced the “ﬁve constants” of the party’s policy toward the bourgeoisie, had to endure accusations of “harboring ox demons and snake spirits” and “ca- pitulationism.”115 The criticism against Xu, unlike the attacks on his predecessor, became an excuse to shut down United Front institutions.

After Zhou’s meeting with the Red Guards, things moved quickly. Only two weeks later, Zhou convened the Central Caucus, an ad-hoc group made up by members of the

Politburo Standing Committee set up to run day-to-day affairs in the tumultuous fall of

1966, to approve a report on the policy of dividends.116 On September 23, the Party Center approved the report and ordered the re-designation of all joint public-private joint management ﬁrms as state enterprises and the cancellation of dividend payments.117 A year later, the rebels who had seized power in Shanghai calculated that capitalists across the coun-

112 Li, Geming zaofan niandai, I:102. 113 Li, I:102. 114 Beijing hangkong xueyuan hongqi zhandoudui, “Zhou zongli dui Beijing shi hongweibing daibiao de jianghua,” 59. 115 Zhonggong zhongyang tongzhanbu, “ ’Wenhua dageming’ dui tongyi zhanxian de yanzhong pohuai.” 116 Gong, Zhongguo ershi shiji tongjian, 4407 117 “Zhongyang guanyu caizheng maoyi he shougongye fangmian ruogan zhengce wenti de baogao” 中央关于财政贸易和手工业方面若干政策问题的报告 (The Center on some policy issues in ﬁnance, trade, and handicraft industry), cited in Wang, Da dongluan, 76–77.

146 try had “sucked out 1.2 billion yuan’s worth of the people’s blood and sweat” through the

payments of dividends.118

The early months of the Cultural Revolution provided an opportunity for students and workers to call out the inequalities and injustices of life under socialism, as long as they

framed it in the language of class. Against the received wisdom that the Cultural Revo-

lution was, at its core, a political movement to counter the emergence of a new class of

bureaucrats, Wu Yiching convincingly argues that class became the language to talk about

a variety of social inequalities and illegitimate situations. In his view, earlier studies have

overestimated the coherence of class ideology and consequently overstated the gravity of a

shift from earlier movements against the classes of prerevolutionary classes and the attacks

on “new bourgeois elements” within the party bureaucracy itself. When people learned to

speak the language of class, they did not use it just to criticize party leaders or factional

opponents, but also to bring attention to a wide range of circumstances that should not be.

“In Mao’s China,” Wu explains, “it was considered revolutionary justice to treat classes as

stratiﬁed layers in a hierarchical structure and to classify individuals in accordance with

ﬁxed criteria, such as family origins.”119

In the summer of 1966, the unique entitlements that the Communist Party had granted

the capitalists on the basis of class were taken away from them in the name of class struggle.

The Red Guard movement speciﬁcally targeted capitalists as members of the exploiting

classes of old. The institutions of the United Front, which had themselves become targets of

criticism, offered little protection and the Ministry of Public Security, with Mao’s support,

prohibited the use of arrests or force to “suppress” the movement.120 The Federation of

Industry and Commerce and Minjian were forced to shut down all their activities following

attacks on its representatives. Wang Xingyao, who had headed Shanghai’s Mutual Aid

Fund, was not as fortunate. On June 17, 1968, at the age of sixty-three, he was “persecuted

118 Shanghai shi geming weiyuanhui jiedaizu, Jiedai tongxun, no. 56 (September 2, 1967), 6. All cited issues of Jiedai tongxun are from the Michael Schoenhals collection 119 Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, 47. 120 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 124–6.

147 to death.”121 At the time of his death, the welfare system that he had helped maintain was no more. The Cultural Revolution destroyed the institutional conditions for preserving capitalist difference along with the institutional protection for the capitalist population.

121 Shanghai gongshang shetuan zhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Shanghai gongshang shetuan zhi, 44.

148 4 Standards of entitlement

The Red Guards took the revolution from the streets into the private home. For a few weeks

in the late summer of 1966, the persistent separation of the domestic sphere from the ex-

ternal community was disrupted for hundreds of thousands of people across China. Red

August, as this period became known, saw groups of adolescents going from one private

dwelling to the next conﬁscating everything from books to mahjong sets and trashing books

and antiques in front of startled residents.1

One of these homes belonged to Zheng Nian, a highly educated and well-connected woman whose late husband had directed the China branch of an American oil company. In

party jargon, she was a “capitalist dependent.” In her memoirs, she describes one summer

day when a group of Red Guards came banging on the door of her luxurious residence in

the former French Concession of downtown Shanghai. As she went to open the door, she

picked up a copy of the Constitution from her bookshelf. In an attempt to stop the students

from barging in, she held up the booklet and proclaimed “It’s against the Constitution of

the People’s Republic of China to enter a private house without a search warrant.” Unim-

pressed, the Red Guards answered that the Constitution had already been abolished and

that it was a document written by revisionists.2 In the exchange, Zheng Nian overstated the

inviolable nature of a principle that was historically derived rather than absolute. Still, she

1 A prominent theme in memoirs and ﬁlms about the Cultural Revolution, there has been remarkably little scholarly work on the house raids and especially the process of restitution; among the few exceptions in the English language are Ho, “Revolutionizing Antiquity”; Ho, Curating Revolution; and Lu, “Seizing Civilization”; Chinese studies on the topic are typically found along a continuum from local history to memoir, the result of the historians being, to a large extent, witnesses themselves, see notably Li, “Hong bayue”; He, “Yi fen chaojia wuzi chuli jiakuan qingdan”; Jin, “Beijing hongweibing zai Shanghai”; Yin, “Hongweibing ’po si jiu’ de wenhua yu zhengzhi”; and Huang, “Po si jiu yundong.” 2 Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai, 64.

149 was right in the sense that the entry was a transgression of established norms. As for the

Red Guards, they clearly took great liberties with the truth when they claimed that the Con- stitution had been overturned. And yet, the lack of any intervention from the authorities was in itself proof of their right to rebel.

Fifteen years later, another widow was put on the stand for the house raids and other transgressions of the Cultural Revolution. A Special Court convened in Beijing in the winter

1980/81 to pass judgment on two “anti-party cliques” one of which had been led by Jiang

Qing, who had been married to Mao until his death four years prior. When the prosecutor accused her of having orchestrated “illegal raids” (非法抄家 feifa chaojia) of Liu Shaoqi’s home, she did not refute the facts but modiﬁed the frame of interpretation: “To make the

Red Guards’ destruction of the ‘four olds’ and raiding of homes out to be illegal is to lose view of the historical background of the time. The destruction of the ‘four olds’ necessitated the house raids; it was a revolutionary action.”3 Jiang Qing evoked the same revolutionary authority as the Red Guards had before her. The prosecutor’s characterization of the raids as illegal was nonsensical, she argued, because a revolutionary movement could not be conﬁned by laws, nor could legal reasoning be applied retroactively to pass judgment on revolutionary action.4 Like the new political leadership, the Special Court did not share this interpretation and sentenced her to a suspended death sentence with a two-year reprieve.

The house raids lasted only a few weeks but the recollections of the two women show just how difﬁcult it proved to reconcile the event with the mode of politics that had settled in the seventeen years since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. What was so extraordinary about the raids was the unprecedented suspension of state control that followed when the party gave students and workers the mandate to take political struggle from the streets into the privacy of homes.5 If the party professed ambitions to remake the

3 MLD: 1928 4 On the defense of Jiang Qing and the other accused, see Cook, The Cultural Revolution on Trial, 103–35. 5 On the conceptual level, the very term “private” presents difﬁculties in the given context. To be analytically useful, it has to be disentangled from the web of values and signiﬁcation in which it has become entrapped by European philosophers. In recent years, scholars of Chinese society and students of socialist history have ex- plored alternative approaches to the topic, e.g. Li, Shanghai Homes; Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind; McDougall and Hansson, Chinese Concepts of Privacy; Siegelbaum, Borders of Socialism.

150 most intimate aspects of social life, familial homes had remained secluded spaces in which socially necessary labor took place shielded from the noisy sphere of politics.6 Once inside socialism’s hidden abodes, the Red Guards conﬁscated or destroyed personal belongings.

In 1966, loud supporters and muted opponents both recognized that the raids constituted a radical departure from established norms. After Mao’s death in 1976, the new political leadership judged that the departure had been an unjustiﬁable transgression.

The memoir of a victim and the plea of an accused perpetrator are adversarial by design.

They occur at a late stage in the formation of injustice when there is already a high degree of clarity as to which experiences constitute injuries and what general characteristics mark the victim and the perpetrator.7 At this stage, the script has already been written and what remains is nothing more—nothing less—than to cast the roles and act out the drama. But to begin the story of the responses to the house raids at a time when the party had already put forward its verdict on the past would amount to taking injustice as a given; to treat it like a thing that was always there waiting to be recognized by the powers that be. By tracing the bureaucratic handling looted goods and the emergence of various claims to restitution, this chapter avoids an ahistorical view on the house raids and their legacy.

The focus below remains the capitalist population, which became a preferred target of

Red Guards who rebelled against the preservation of material comforts and institutional protection for a group that they had learned to identify as the exploiters and oppressors of the past. After the raids, the relative importance of capitalists’ assets among the looted goods piling up in the warehouses or stuck in frozen bank deposits meant that any effective policy on restitution would have to take this demographic into account. Most importantly, the undetermined status of the bourgeoisie made this group, ﬁrst, a conspicuous omission and, later, the explicit focus for a renegotiation of entitlement and belonging in the wake of the house raids.

6 It is true that the Chinese Communist Party adopted measures to reorganize aspects of family life—with an increased female participation in the industrial workforce and the collectivization of agriculture being the most notable examples—but the commitment to eliminate distinctions between the domestic and the public was uneven; on the socialist state’s continued reliance on a separate domestic sphere, in which women’s work remained unremunerated and invisible, see Hershatter, The Gender of Memory, 182–209. 7 Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat, “The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes.”

151 4.1 A temporary home for the “olds”

One of the most iconic photographs from the Cultural Revolution portrays a crowd gathering in the streets of Hefei to watch a bonﬁre on top of which three burning bodhisattva statues are clearly visible.8 The picture was taken in September 1966 as Red Guards were mobilizing in response to a nationwide call to destroy the “four olds”: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.9 Weeks earlier, Lin Biao had urged the sea of students who had gathered atthe Tiananmen Squarein Beijing to destroy the “four olds” and getrid of the “human vermin” (人虫 renchong) in the process.10 The dehumanizing rhetoric blurred the line between the elimination of reactionary things, reactionary thoughts, and the reactionary persons who became known as “ox-monsters and snake-demons.”11 In their comments,

Lin Biao and Mao Zedong endorsed radical action but did not provide exact instructions as to what this would entail in practice. Instead, the students had to rely on their own understanding of the movement as it evolved through the reading of political signals, direct consultation with party leaders in the capital, and confrontation with local ofﬁcials.12 When the students started ransacking temples and private homes, burning books, destroying sites of cultural heritage, and conﬁscating antiques, the forces of law and order were instructed to look the other way.

In Shanghai, some ﬁve hundred kilometers east of Hefei, Red Guards trashed temples and churches while rounding up monks and priests for public criticism and humiliation. A small temple in a downtown residential area lost its Buddhist idol to a group of students who ended up dumping it in the nearby Suzhou Creek.13 In the efforts to reshape the urban landscape, Red Guards also took aim against the residues of a more recent past: that

8 The image features on the cover of the landmark study by Esherick, Pickowicz, and Walder, Cultural Revolution as History; and among the illustrations in the seminal MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution. 9 On the elimination of the “four olds,” see Yin, “Hongweibing ’po si jiu’ de wenhua yu zhengzhi”; Huang, “Po si jiu yundong”; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 114–6. 10 Wang, Da dongluan, 50–51. 11 Schoenhals, “Demonising Discourse in Mao Zedong’s China.” 12 Xu, “Dialogic Struggle in the Becoming of the Cultural Revolution”; see also Walder, “Ambiguity and Choice in Political Movements.” 13 Shanghai wenge shiliao bianzuan xiaozu, Shanghai wenge shihua, 94–95.

152 of colonial subjugation and capitalist exploitation. In Shanghai, the campaign against the

“four olds” began when groups of students gathered at Nanjing Road to replace existing

shop names and streets signs with new and red names.14 Just a few hundred meters to the

south, Red Guards joined the employees of the Great World—the renowned entertainment

complex and symbol of a colonial and decadent past—to take down the large sign outside

of the building. For a few years, the venue was instead known as The East is Red Theater,

a somewhat misleading name given that the building temporarily stopped hosting cultural

events and served instead as a warehouse for the Shanghai Foreign Trade Bureau.15 The

Great World’s new function is a hint of the vast logistical operation that took place in the

background of “the four olds”’ more conspicuous streetside activities.

The scope of destruction was important, but the black and white picture of iconoclasm

requires some nuance. New research has stressed the efforts by bureaucrats and residents to

preserve relics—with varying degrees of success.16 As Denise Ho has argued, the Chinese

Communist Party had a complex relationship with objects from the past, which it shared with other revolutionary regimes, and the cultural bureaucracy was able to make a case for

preservation even in 1966.17 By invoking a directive from Premier Zhou Enlai, to take one

example, Shanghai ofﬁcials took actions assuring that the Jade Buddha Temple sustained

only minor losses in the summer of 1966.18 Although the structure remained intact, this

temple was forced, like other places of worship, to suspend all religious activities.19 In

1967, the authorities commandeered the temple in the name of revolution.

Under its new management, the Jade Buddha Temple became a site for handling the fall-

out of the “four olds” movement. All those reactionary and illicit objects that had not been

14 Shanghai wenge shiliao bianzuan xiaozu, 49–50, 91–93; the movement was not driven by Red Guards alone as illustrated by the fact that the very ﬁrst institution in Shanghai to formally change its name, the Xinmin Evening News which became the Shanghai Evening News on August 23, did so following pressure from within the newspaper and not on due to demands from students, see Li, Geming zaofan niandai, I:99. 15 Li, Geming zaofan niandai, I:99–100. 16 Ho, “To Protect and Preserve”; Ho, “Revolutionizing Antiquity.” 17 Ho, “Revolutionizing Antiquity”; for a complementary perspective on the party elite’s taste for the archaic, see Yang, “Archaistic Perfection.” 18 Ho, Curating Revolution, 233. 19 “‘Wenhua da geming’ zhong de chuanfang feng” “文化大革命” 中的抢房风 (The wind of house occupation in the “Cultural Revolution”) in Shanghai fangdichan zhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Shanghai fangdichan zhi.

153 immediately destroyed but had been confiscated by the Red Guards needed a home and it was up to the bureaucracy, itself crippled by the ongoing hunt on revisionists among party and state officials, to find a place for seized property. For this purpose, the Shanghai Revo- lutionary Committee set up the Group for Sorting Cultural Relics and Books (上海市文物图

书清理小组 Shanghai shi wenwu tushu qingli xiaozu) in April 1967 following a directive from

Beijing.20 It was this group that ordered the spacious east wing of the Jade Buddha Temple

(which measured over one thousand square meters) to be repurposed into an impromptu warehouse for seized antiques.21 The stockpiles of seized possessions towered particularly high in Shanghai. The city had experienced far more raids than any other place in the country, with reports of as many as 157,000 private households ransacked between late August and late September 1966 (Table 4.1).22 In 1980, the Shanghai government reported that as many as 250,000 homes had been raided in the Cultural Revolution, but this larger ﬁgure adds searches from the late 1960s and probably the early 1970s to the Red Guard activities.23

Yet, here one must ask what is actually counted. Searches in 1967 and later would have required the authorization of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee and been carried out by public security ofﬁcials or by Red Guards in cooperation with the authorities, blurring the distinction to ordinary policing in extraordinary times. While ofﬁcial statistics should be taken with a measure of caution, the relative importance of the number of reported house raids in Shanghai does appear consistent with qualitative evidence.

By all accounts, capitalists were overrepresented among the targets of house raids. In

Tianjin, capitalist residents and other groups covered by the United Front made up eighty percent of the raided households.24 In Shanghai, the available data suggests almost a third of the raided households belonged to capitalists and that capitalist homes accounted for

20 For an in-depth study centering on this group and its activities, see Ho, “Revolutionizing Antiquity”; and for the role of the Shanghai Museum, Lu, “Seizing Civilization,” 168–228. 21 SHMA: B172-3-5, 16 22 This is the figure given in a well-researched official history of Shanghai’s Cultural Revolution which was never approved for publication but circulated for internal reference, see Shanghai wenge shiliao bianzuan xiaozu, Shanghai wenge shihua, 103; the figure is consistent with Wang Nianyi’s figure of 84,222 homes searched in Shang- hai between August 23 and September 8, see Wang, Da dongluan, 71. 23 SHMA: B1-9-228, 73; a report on April 20, 1969 tells of 200,000 homes raided, see SHMA: B134-3-198 24 Tianjin shi difangzhi bianxiu weiyuanhui, Tianjin jianzhi, 131.

154 one ﬁfth of occupied households.25 The targets included several famous capitalists and

their families, including the son of Liu Hongsheng and the daughter of Rong Yiren.26 The

spacious residence of Guo Linshuang, former president of the Yong’an Department Stores, was raided at least seven times and brieﬂy served as the operational base for the Shanghai

Red Guards Headquarters, which like most of the early outﬁts was made up by children of

cadres.27

From 48,000 capitalist families in Shanghai, the Red Guards netted money, bonds and

other valuables for an estimated worth of 480 million yuan.28 As for the Shanghai Group for

Sorting Cultural Relics and Books, it collected over three million conﬁscated cultural relics

and handicrafts and almost ﬁve and a half million books.29 With its own storage facilities

ﬁlled to the limit, it turned to the Jade Buddha Temple and similar locations to alleviate the

pressure.30 As most arrangements of conﬁscated goods, this was intended as a temporary

solution. Especially since the temple was considered a poor substitute not just because of

its architectural layout but also due to the temple’s cultural signiﬁcance.31 And yet, the

persistent problem with ﬁnding storage space made this and similar arrangements last far

longer than anticipated.32

Ownership was key to the administrative case for preservation in the face of ongoing

iconoclasm. In its ﬁrst opinion on the preservation of cultural relics, the Party Center framed

the issue in the following terms: “Our country is a country with a long history and a rich

tradition and outstanding heritage of revolution; there is a great plentitude of cultural relics

and books that have been preserved through time. These cultural relics and books are all

state property […].”33 The state reserved the prerogative to decide on matters of cultural

25 Zhonggong Shanghai dangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Zhonggong Shanghai dangzhi, 537. 26 Shanghai wenge shiliao bianzuan xiaozu, Shanghai wenge shihua, 102. 27 “‘Wenhua da geming’ zhong de chuanfang feng”; Li, Geming zaofan niandai, I:97–98. 28 Zhonggong Shanghai dangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Zhonggong Shanghai dangzhi, 537. 29 Zhonggong Shanghai dangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, 578. 30 SHMA: B248-2-194, 101 31 SHMA: B172-3-5, 16 32 SHMA: B248-2-194, 101 33 MLD: 2185; the same argument was repeated in “Zhonggong zhongyang, Guowuyuan, Zhongyang junwei guanyu baohu guojia caichan, jieyue nao geming de tongzhi” 中共中央、国务院、中央军委关于保护国家财产、节约闹革命的通知 (Notice from the CCP Center, State Council and Military Affairs Committee on protecting state

155 Table 4.1: Reported number of households raided in selected cities, August–October 1966

City Total households Households raided per 1000 households

Beijing 955,000 33,695 35

Chongqing 457,000 13,160 23

Shanghai 1,390,000 157,000 113

Tianjin 860,000 12,000 14

Wuhan 506,000 21,000 42 Sources: Wang Nianyi, Da dongluan, 71; Chongqing shi gong’anju shizhi bangongshi, ed. Chongqing gong’an dashiji, quoted in He Shu, ”Yi fen chaojia wuzi chuli jiakuan qingdan”; Shanghai wenge shiliao bianzuan xuanzu, ed. Shanghai wenge shihua (Shanghai, 1994), 103; Tianjin shi difangzhi bianxiu weiyuanhui, ed. Tianjin jianzhi (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1991), 131; Yang Jisheng, Tiandi fanfu

heritage, without distinctions as to the origin of the objects in question, based on the argument that relics belonged to the country and thus the state. Other arguments for preservation were rooted in this idea of the state as owner, or at least custodian, of cultural relics.

When Qi Benyu of the Central Cultural Revolution Group proposed that the Palace Mu- seum would be remade into a site for class education he said the imperial collection should be protected as people’s property.34

The burning of books and trashing of temples may have produced the most striking im- agery of the Red Guard movement, but the sorting of conﬁscated goods and deciding who had the right to restitution and compensation was a broader and longer-lasting process with material effects in the lives of a great number of people. The renegotiation of entitlement and belonging was directly relevant to the legitimacy of the house raids and, by extension, the Cultural Revolution.

property and economizing when making revolution). In Zhonggong zhongyang bangongting, Guowuyuan mishuting lianhe jiedaishi, Wuchan jieji wenhua da geming youguan wenjian huiji 34 Ho, “Revolutionizing Antiquity,” 693.

156 4.2 How ownership matters were postponed until further notice

The party leadership’s endorsement of the “sweeping away” or even “destruction” of old

culture conﬂicted with efforts at cultural preservation which also had support from the

highest level. But the matter of deciding who had the right to conﬁscated items was an

even more contentious issue as it pertained to closely intertwined issues of entitlement and

belonging. In contrast to the early and explicit references to state ownership in the policy on

cultural preservation, the handling of conﬁscated goods that did not have a cultural or his-

torical value could not be decided on the basis of ownership alone, for the state recognized

no right to ownership for class enemies and reactionaries. The towering piles of conﬁs-

cated goods and the chronic lack of storage were symptoms of ofﬁcial indecision in matters

of restitution and appropriation. Without an authoritative decision on the legitimacy of the

house raids there was no way to get past the hesitation.

In the ﬁrst year after the raids, the bureaucracy’s preferred mode of action was inaction.

On matters of conﬁscated belongings, the standard policy was “do not deal with this for the

time being” (暂时不处理 zanshi bu chuli). In May 1967, rebels who had taken control over the

lower level of government in Shanghai received the following instructions: “On the issue

of handling conﬁscated goods. At present there is no need to go to any great lengths. When

handling [this issue] it is necessary to pay attention to the consolidation of the achievements

of the Cultural Revolution and to afﬁrm the contributions of the Red Guards.”35 Turning

to the controversial issue of restitution, the same document explained that the return of

conﬁscated belongings would only come into question if it was certain that the victim was

a wrongfully targeted member of the toiling masses and, even then, the authorities should

allow no expression of resentment from those affected by such “errors.”36 Their situation was unfortunate and should be rectiﬁed as soon as possible, but their experience fell short

of constituting an injustice.

The bureaucratic reaction in the ﬁrst year after the house raids ﬁt with the party’s long-

35 Shanghai shi geming weiyuanhui jiedaizu, Jiedai tongxun 接待通讯 [Reception Bulletin], no. 12 (May 3, 1967), 5 36 Jiedai tongxun, no. 12 (May 3, 1967), 5

157 established strategy for mass movements. From the party’s ﬁrst major rectiﬁcation campaign in the Yan’an revolutionary base area had emerged a pattern of political mobilization in two stages: a primary stage in which ordinary constraints were temporarily suspended, with widespread violence and abuse as a predictable result, and a secondary stage in which the party would step in to correct some of the excesses it had allowed.37 To know when the time was right for correction was to master the dialectics of political struggle.

At a time when battles were still raging in the streets and new revolutionary committees had yet to establish their authority, Mao signed off on the ﬁrst document to standardize the administration of conﬁscated property on March 20, 1967.38 Central Document (1967)

No. 107 carried a report from the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region, where factional conﬂict and army repression killed more people than in any other Chinese province.39 The

Wuzhou Municipal Cultural Revolution Group did not write about the killings but its concerns that conﬁscated goods might be damaged in the upcoming rain season. The Party

Center circulated the Wuzhou report “for reference” and added an authoritative comment consisting of four generally held points, each no more than a couple of lines. Despite its brevity, this document was the ﬁrst clear signal to the provinces that restitution of personal property was a priority. This did not, however, mean that the movement had reached the stage of revision. That same summer, Mao backed the idea of supplying arms and give military support to factions still jostling for power in the provinces. The result was near-civil war in many parts of the country.40

Although the decision on restitution followed the same general pattern of excess and revision as the overall movement, it presented a unique set of political, logistical, and metro- logical challenges. Even in an ideal context where there is a comprehensive and transparent legal framework in place, matters of restitution are notoriously drawn-out and costly

37 Leese and Engman, “Introduction,” 13. 38 MLD: 2176 39 Su, Collective Killings in Rural China During the Cultural Revolution; Walder, “Rebellion and Repression in China, 1966–1971.” 40 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 199–220.

158 affairs.41 With a crippled bureaucracy, upended norms, and violent factional conﬂicts, the

People’s Republic of 1967 fell far short of the ideal.

4.3 Even reactionary things get wet in the rain

The Shanghai Revolutionary Committee—which became the ﬁrst in the country to receive

Mao’s approval following a relatively smooth seizure of power—had set up its own Group for Handling Looted Goods (上海市革命委员会抄家财物处理组 Shanghai shi geming weiyuanhui chaojia caiwu chulizu) by the end of March 1967. The group continued to handle matters related to looted goods when the ofﬁcial policy of restitution expanded after the death of

Mao. Shanghai was not alone. Around the time of Central Document No. 107, major cities and smaller towns all over the country set up organizations to return conﬁscated property to former owners. The fact that some grievances related to the Red Guards’ ransacking and occupation of homes linger on to this day, some forty years after the ofﬁcial end of the

Cultural Revolution, attests not just to the politically sensitive nature of redressing suffering caused by the policies of the Communist Party but also to the administrative and logistical challenges inherent to restitution.

The Shanghai Group for Handling Looted Goods drafted the first citywide plan for handling confiscated property following a month of visits to schools, hospitals, factories, and the rural communes of suburban Shanghai.42 On May 23, it invited cadres from the city’s districts for a discussion of the draft and coordination of responses to the variety of issues involved in restitution.43 There was a need for bureaucratic coordination because the Red Guards had seized a wide range of belongings for a variety of reasons. They had seized books and antiques because of their reactionary nature, but they had also netted large amounts of cash and bonds as well as stashes of gold and silver. The confiscation of monetary assets and precious metals was justified both in terms of historical justice and

41 Southern, “Restitution or Compensation.” 42 Jiedai tongxun, no. 10 (April 27, 1967), 6; Jiedai tongxun, no. 17 (May 20, 1967), 2 43 MLD: 5546

159 Figure 4.1: Institutions involved in the work with conﬁscated goods in Shanghai ongoing class struggle. In depriving capitalists and landlords of their savings, the students made a claim on wealth unjustly amassed through exploitation. At the same time, they motivated their actions as a way to protect the revolution and socialism. The Red Guards belonged to a generation that had grown up hearing that class enemies kept ledgers, stashes of foreign currency, and property maps in anticipation of a “change in the heaven” (变天 biantian) when they would reclaim property as well as power.44 Seen in this context, the biantianzhang and biantiantu—the maps and ledgers saved for the restoration—became evidence of a conspiracy of hidden enemies and foreign powers to overthrow socialism.45 In order to clarify the responsibilities of the different institutions involved in the administration of looted goods, the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee distinguished between four types of goods.46 Any cultural relics and books with “conservation value” were the responsibility of the aforementioned Group for Sorting Cultural Relics and Books, but such items only constituted a portion of the looted goods.

44 Ho, Curating Revolution, 153. 45 Cf. Qiang, “Mao Zedong and Dulles’s ‘Peaceful Evolution’ Strategy.” 46 MLD: 5547

160 Illegal and dangerous items were handed over to the ofﬁces of public security organs.

The Red Guards proudly displayed firearms and radio equipment as evidence that they had thwarted the enemy’s preparations for counterrevolution. By all accounts, such eye- catching finds were rare. Far more common among the illegal belongings, at least if the records of one Shanghai county are any indication, were set of mahjong tiles.47 Since the foundation of the People’s Republic, the authorities had fought a continuous and losing battle against gambling and its corrupting influence on society. With the help of students deputized by revolutionary authority, the clampdown on every form of gambling went further than ever before.

Consumer goods, raw materials, and luxury items made up a third type of looted goods.

Here, the question was whether or not such items should be approved for commercial redistribution. Like in Guangxi, the arrival of the yearly spring rains created a sense of urgency as the humid weather threatened to damage or spoil certain goods. Rather than letting food and medicine go to waste, the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee authorized the sale of all items at risk.48 In addition to goods that could be damaged or would soon expire, the Rev- olutionary Committee drew up a short list of luxury items that could be put up for sale, including precious stones, jewelry, fridges, and television sets.49 When the spring rains were replaced by summer heat, it added electric fans conﬁscated from capitalist households to the list of items that could be sold, with the motivation that they would help prevent heat- stroke among the city’s residents.50

The looted goods created a niche market supervised by the Shanghai Looted Goods

Commercial Acquisition Group (上海市抄家财物商业收购组 Shanghai shi chaojia caiwu shangye shougouzu). The details of how one would have gone about to acquire conﬁscated belongings remain hazy, but it is possible that the Shanghai group, like its counterparts in other cities, issued some type of coupon intended exclusively for the purchase of conﬁscated

47 MLC: G312 48 MLD: 5546 49 MLD: 5547 50 MLD: 5548

161 Figure 4.2: Recto-verso of coupon for procurement of looted goods

162 goods. One such coupon from the Tianjin Municipal Ofﬁce for Handling Looted Goods

(Figure 4.2) speciﬁed the following conditions for its use on the reverse side: “1. Can only be used for the purchase of commercial items from the handling of conﬁscated goods; 2.

Cannot be tampered with; 3. Cannot be copied, resold; violators will be punished according to the law; 4. Keep safe, will not be replaced if lost; 5. Take note of the validity period, invalid upon expiration.”

In Shanghai, the Commercial Acquisition Group preceded over a network of district- level units and units within the municipal bureaus for commerce, food, and commodities as well as the city’s sales cooperatives. The redistribution of conﬁscated items required a great deal of paperwork, including producing quadruple lists of concerned items with information on their original owners.51 It was also up to the Commercial Acquisition Group to standardize the pricing (作价 zuojia) of conﬁscated goods. For example, medicine and food were priced at eighty percent of the standard wholesale price, whereas raw materials, metal, and machine parts were sold at ninety percent or at the price set by state planners.

By contrast, trash and other useless objects—a category that included pearl necklaces, dia- mond rings, and jade trinkets—were priced at material cost (回收价 huishoujia).52 However, jewelry made of precious metals was considered a form of monetary asset. When the historical verdict on the Cultural Revolution was reversed a decade later, the paper trail left by the Commercial Acquisition Group allowed the authorities to track down former owners and estimate the value of lost items.

The local redistribution of consumer goods paled in comparison to ambitious plans to export looted items. In June 1969, the Shanghai Foreign Trade Bureau requested control over the makeshift warehouse in the Jade Buddha Temple and three other storage facilities (corresponding to approximately five thousand square meters in total) to meet a large influx of looted goods.53 The reason that the Foreign Trade Bureau suddenly found itself submerged in confiscated goods was a decision by the Group for Sorting Cultural Relics and

51 MLD: 5549, 5 52 MLD: 5549, 5–6 53 SHMA: B248-2-194, 101

163 Books that between seventy to eighty percent of the 2.3 million pieces of looted goods kept in warehouses across the city were items of little historical and cultural value that could be exported. Then, in the ﬁnal days of 1968, the Party Center had approved the Shanghai Rev- olutionary Committee’s plan to set apart antiques that could be exported, give them a price, and deliver them to the local ofﬁces of the China Arts and Crafts Import-Export Company and the Shanghai Cultural Relics Store.54

The Canton Fair, a semiannual event targeting foreign traders, offered a venue for moving goods out of the warehouses and help generate some foreign exchange. Lu Di Yin’s interviews with art dealers show the impact on the global market: “‘Between 1968 and

1973 the market in Chinese art went bananas.’ Cultural Revolution conﬁscations injected the market with previously unprecedented numbers of Chinese antiquities. Japanese, Eu- ropean, and American collectors, as well as new wealth in Hong Kong met that availability by ‘suddenly becoming very active […] driving the market up like crazy.’”55

Monetary assets constituted the fourth and ﬁnal type of items identiﬁed by the Shanghai

Revolutionary Committee. The People’s Bank stashed vast amounts of cash, bonds, and precious metals seized in the raids. Again, there was a great deal of paperwork involved. The

Shanghai branch of the People’s Bank required any unit handing over cash and valuables to ﬁll out a form (in three copies) noting the type of assets it was submitting and the original owner.56 Most assets were simply locked away, either in work units or in bank vaults, but there was one notable exception. The People’s Bank of China, in a report approved and transmitted by the State Council in January 1968, recommended a wait-and-see approach in the matter of conﬁscated valuables, given the lack of any policy decision and lack of clarity as to the status of the persons whose possession had been seized, but instructed local banks to collect and transfer all foreign currencies, receipts, and securities abroad as soon as possible to obtain foreign exchange; should it be decided that the original owner was

54 SHMA: B248-2-194, 101 55 Lu, “Seizing Civilization,” 239. 56 MLD: 5550, 9-10

164 eligible for restitution the sum would be paid out in renminbi.57 Foreign currencies were

replaced by renminbi to generate much-needed foreign exchange.

Unlike the other institutions involved in the administration of looted goods, the Peo-

ple’s Bank became an enforcer of dispossession. On February 18, 1968, a Central Document

instructed the People’s Bank to freeze the bank accounts of various “bad people.”58 This

served as an ex post facto justiﬁcation for measures that had already been put in place in

the provinces. The Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, for example, had issued similar

instructions six months earlier.59 It would take over a decade until the party reversed the

decision and those affected regained full access to their savings.60 Compounded with mass

layoffs, early retirement and exclusion from the social security offered through the labor

union, the freezing of bank deposits left numerous families in ﬁnancial hardship. The only way for those families who could not make ends meet or experienced health issues to gain

access to a portion of their savings was to ﬁle a request with their work unit. Only with written approval from the work unit would the bank allow the withdrawal of a given sum.

Although such requests became something of a routine matter in the later stages of the

Cultural Revolution, they were highly contentious in 1967–68. This was highlighted by a

report from the town of Ruijin that circulated among Shanghai ofﬁcials in late 1967 as a warning.61 The report told of a woman ill with cancer who had gone each month to with-

draw a small sum of money for medicines. As she was classiﬁed a “bourgeois element” she

did not have free access to healthcare so when the doctors told her that she needed surgery

she asked the cadre who was in charge of safeguarding her belongings if it would not be less

trouble for everyone if she could just have her two seals back. Before the aforementioned

decision by the Party Center in February 1968 to freeze the bank accounts of capitalists and

other “bad people,” the only way in which the authorities could limit access to personal

savings accounts was by keeping the seals used for identiﬁcation at the bank. In this case,

57 Translated in Schoenhals, CCP Central Documents from the Cultural Revolution, pp. 245–6 58 MLD: 5551 59 Jiedai tongxun, no. 56 (September 2, 1967), 1-2 60 MLD: 878; MLD: 2437 61 MLD: 5552, 29

165 the cadre found the woman’s arguments sound and gave her back one of the two seals (the other one had been misplaced). The events that followed made the anecdote required reading for the Shanghai bureaucracy: when a bank representative came to collect foreign stocks and bonds, which were to be converted into renminbi, the cadre who had returned the seal discovered that the woman had owned foreign stocks. Or, in the concluding words of the report, he and his fellow-ofﬁcials “ﬁnally realized they had happened upon a vampire’s evil plan.”62

The cautionary tale of the Ruijin “vampire”—a popular slur for capitalists and other exploiters—illustrates two aspects of restitution as it pertained to members of the bourgeoisie. First, how it was possible for capitalists to gain access to conﬁscated assets as early as 1967 and, second, how precarious and potentially dangerous their claim could be. In a

1968 report with the revealing title “The Handling of Conﬁscated Goods is a Severe Class

Struggle,” Shanghai’s Bureau for Chemical Industry explained how it had exposed and punished reactionaries and bad elements for using extortion and deception to retrieve con-

ﬁscated belongings.63 In its earliest document on conﬁscated belongings, the Party Center had warned for attempts by the class enemy to take advantage of restitution work to “cry out about injustices in a counterattack to settle old scores” and instructed the provinces to punish such acts severely.64 Judging from such evidence, the circumstances were highly unfavorable for claims to restitution, but such claims were nevertheless made.

4.4 The Shanghai Reception Group

In 1967–68, Shanghai was controlled by rebels who either owed their position to the Red

Guard movement or had supported both house raids and student rebels from within the party organization. An early draft regulation on conﬁscated goods introduced the matter like so: “In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Red Guards went into the streets

62 MLD: 5552, 29 63 MLD: 5553 64 MLD: 2176

166 to sweep away the ‘four olds,’ ransacking the homes of the people’s enemies, the parasites,

and the vampires. They collected their hidden treasures of gold and silver, ledgers prepared

for a change in heaven, and all kinds of murderous weapons and put them on display,

exposing them to the public; this is the great contribution of our Red Guards!”65 It went on

to describe its own work with setting prices and distributing conﬁscated items as adding to

the “consolidation of revolutionary victory.” Such messages reﬂected a bureaucratic culture

in which the dismissal of illegitimate claims was a task of even greater importance than

restitution to the wrongfully dispossessed.

However emphatic the support for the revolutionary action of the “little generals”—the

paternalistically affectionate name for the Red Guards used at the time—it did not mean that

claims to conﬁscated property were automatically rejected. In fact, a considerable number

of complaints were ﬁled in Shanghai in the year after the house raids and some claimants were able to successfully argue their case for restitution.

When Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan convened rebel leaders for a meeting at the

Shanghai Library to discuss the organization of what was brieﬂy called the Shanghai Com-

mune but soon renamed the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee.66 The meeting agreed that

the new organ was to be a lean organization consisting of only seven groups. Among the

institutions considered absolutely indispensable was the Reception Group (接待组 jiedaizu)

made up by Red Guards from Jiaotong University and rebel cadres from the now defunct

party committee. Similar groups had appeared to manage coordination and communica-

tion during the “great exchange of revolutionary experiences” in the fall of 1966 but grown

to be vital with the intensiﬁcation of factional struggles when they served as places to hear

accusations and address conﬂicts and to keep the national leadership informed about the

movement.67 Not for nothing did Wang Li, member of the Central Cultural Revolution

65 MLD: 5549, 5 66 Meeting on February 3, 1967, see “Shanghai yi yue geming dashiji” 上海一月革命大事记 [Record of Major Events in Shanghai’s January Revolution]. In Xu Jingxian, Wenge mingren Xu Jingxian zuihou huiyi 67 On the establishment of a reception group in Shanghai in October 1966, to accommodate incoming students and provide them with food and housing, see Jin, Feichang yu zhengchang, 64–96; on the importance of petitioning in the years of factional struggle, see Thireau and Hua, Les ruses de la démocratie, 124.

167 Group, describe the organ on which the ones in Shanghai and other cities were modeled as a “political thermometer” by which to gauge the movement.68

The Shanghai Reception Group was an instrument to monitor public moods and an institution for hearing grievances. In a comment shortly after the establishment of the Re- ception Group, Yao Wenyuan underscored its value as a producer of intelligence that could uncover lingering revisionists in the administration or even counterrevolutionary plots.69

He instructed the Reception Group not only to send him personal copies of all important letters but also submit summary reports every two-three days to Beijing. These reports were to systematize knowledge by providing statistics and breaking down the letters according to the different types of grievances. At the same occasion, Zhang Chunqiao opined that letters addressed directly to him and Yao were actually letters to the Center (as the two of them were both members of the Central Cultural Revolution Group in addition to having top positions in the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee).70 Some of these could be handled by local cadres, others had to be sent to Beijing, but the important thing was “to not only read the letters but to handle [the issues they addressed] conscientiously.” One function could not be separated from the other. For the Reception Group to produce useful intelligence for the leadership it had to appear to the public as a site where grievances were not just heard but potentially addressed.

Dispossession was not an uncommon cause for petition. In April 1967, the month following Document No. 107 containing the Party Center’s first comments on restitution, there were 689 appeals related to confiscated belongings which meant just above two percent of the total number of petitions handled by the Reception Group’s network of offices around

Shanghai.71 Four months later, there were over nine thousand petitions (thirty-six percent) concerning various “personal requests,” a category that included claims related to house raids but also matters like salary cuts and banishment to the countryside.72

68 Quoted in Schoenhals, “Talk About a Revolution,” 7. 69 Jiedai tongxun, no. 69 (October 18, 1967), 2–3 70 Jiedai tongxun, no. 69 (October 18, 1967), 2–3 71 Jiedai tongxun, no. 15 (May 17, 1967), 8 72 Jiedai tongxun, no. 49 (August 14, 1967), 4-5

168 Petitioners were quick to seize upon opportune moments to address themselves to the

authorities and careful to adopt and adapt both fundamental principles of state and the lat-

est party directives so as to increase their likelihood of success.73 As long as the authorities

did not challenge the legitimacy of the house raids, there were only two lines of argumenta-

tion available to those who claimed restitution. One alternative was to appeal to the socialist

state’s fundamental obligation to sustain all life that it did not put an end to. This was how

the gravely ill woman from Ruijin had gained access to her savings. It was also an argument

open to the many capitalist families who depended on their savings for support, especially

since the government had ended dividend payments and cut salaries for capitalists in the

fall of 1966. Rather than to claiming a right to seized property, the claimant had only to

demonstrate need. One report from early 1967 noted that some households had lost food

coupons in the raids, which “made eating a problem.”74 A needs-based claim only covered

access to savings or the return of “everyday life necessities.” This was deﬁned as items

that allowed one to have the “average living standard of the toiling people” and included

clothes, basic furniture, cooking and washing supplies. It did not cover sofas, pianos, television sets, motorcycles, cars, cameras and the like.75 Claims based on need were as weak

as the claimant’s position was precarious.

The second and far stronger argument was based on a claim of community. Anyone who could demonstrate that they were members of the people rather than class enemies

and lawbreakers were eligible for restitution. This principle was spelled out in Document

No. 107: all conﬁscation of property belonging to the “revolutionary masses and toiling

people” was “wrongful” and such items had to be immediately returned. Furthermore,

any member of this category whose belongings had been lost or damaged was eligible for

compensation.

Because each claim was evaluated on the basis of membership, the conscientious ofﬁ-

cial’s ﬁrst question should be whether the claimant belonged to the category of the people.

73 Thireau and Hua, Les ruses de la démocratie, 126. 74 Jiedai tongxun, no. 8 (April 21, 1967), 4 75 MLD: 5548, 24

169 In this context, the capitalists represented a dilemma. The capitalists had been a liminal group before the Cultural Revolution, but the Communist Party held that the national bourgeoisie as a class of the people and provided this group institutional representation and protection as part of the United Front. However, the house raids had been premised on the notion that the capitalist label was synonymous with an outcast status. In the eyes of their persecutors, all former exploiters were class enemies including those who happened to belong to the national bourgeoisie.

In the spring of 1967, an anonymous petition was sent to the Shanghai Reception Group signed only in the name of “A Few National Bourgeois Elements.” In thinly veiled criticism, the letter writers raised a series of rhetorical question as to the position of the bourgeoisie:

1. Should all bourgeois have their homes raided? What law exists [in support

of this]?

2. Does the national ﬂag still have a star symbolizing the “national bour-

geoisie”?

3. In the relevant documents, it is clearly stipulated that with the exception of

landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and right-

ists all should be rehabilitated. Why cannot the capitalists be rehabilitated?

Why has the national bourgeoisie been included among the six “black”

types? Is this in line with Mao Zedong Thought or not? Why have we

been deprived of all our political rights?

4. Why has the question of the national bourgeoisie been avoided for such a

long time?”76

In 1967, the Shanghai authorities were prepared neither to address these questions nor to accept the insinuated criticism. The letter appeared in the Reception Group’s internal bulletin in a recurring section called “Trends in Class Struggle.” Had they chosen to respond they would have been hard pressed to come up with a satisfying answer. As in so many

76 Jiedai tongxun, no. 4 (April 11, 1967), 7-8

170 matters related to the house raids, the policy was to put them off “for the time being.”

4.5 The Sixth Type

The self-proclaimed National Bourgeois Elements put their collective ﬁnger on the problem with a political response that would reject neither the Red Guard movement, nor throw out

the rules against which the movement had rebelled. The party’s makeshift solution was to

obfuscate the rebellious character of the movement by dressing it in the language of socialist

legality. In Document No. 107, the house raids appeared as a police raid and the Red Guards

as socialist deputies:

Property conﬁscated from landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad

elements, rightists, or other lawless elements is invariably to be turned over [to

the authorities], with the exception of the return to the person in question of

everyday life necessities (but if the original item has been lost or damaged there

will be no compensation).77

Conspicuously absent from the document was any mention of capitalists. The Red

Guards had considered capitalists as one of the “six black types” (黑六类 hei liu lei) of class

enemies and reactionaries; but the Communist Party never ofﬁcially used this term. For

example, the Western District Picket Corps, an elite group of Red Guards established in an

assembly of thirty-one middle schools on August 25, set down as one of its ground rules

that only the homes of “six black elements” could be searched.78 As for the Party Center, it

used the intentionally obscure term “other lawless elements” (其他不法分子 qita bufa fenzi) in

Document No. 107 to cover up the fact that the house raids had targeted a demography that

the party had never considered an enemy and the state never held to be a criminal category.

By favoring the registry of law over the Red Guards’ own language, the party leadership

played down the extent of the transgression. As early as September 1, 1966, Premier Zhou

77 MLD: 2176 78 Walder, Fractured Rebellion, 151; Leese, Mao Cult, 136.

171 Enlai had employed this discursive strategy in a meeting with student representatives in

Beijing. Zhou cautioned the Red Guards to exercise discretion when searching the homes of capitalists in particular, telling them to separate “law-abiding” from “law-breaking” capitalists.79 The former, Zhou maintained, were off-limits just as they had been in the Five Antis campaign of 1952, which had given rise to this distinction. Like in 1952, the party leaders also took steps to protect a handful of high-proﬁle representatives of the United Front from the violence of the mass movement. After receiving a letter from an old acquaintance worried by the house raids, Mao asked of Zhou Enlai to put together a list of high-ranking members of the democratic parties to receive special protection.80 The Premier’s intervention did little to constrain the house raids, but it was signiﬁcant for the party’s attempt to come to terms with the more radical expressions of the movement.

As the very purpose of the references to law was obfuscation, it is hardly surprising that nothing had come from the “investigation” to come up with an authoritative deﬁnition of

“other lawless elements” four months after the Party Center had ﬁrst employed the term.81

As a matter of fact, the term eventually disappeared from ofﬁcial use before any standard deﬁnition had been agreed upon.

The lack of precision was an obstacle to provincial authorities that had to translate vague guidelines from Beijing into hard-and-fast criteria that could help decide claims to restitution. At the very least, they needed some sort of working definition. This explains why a provisory list of “other lawless elements” from Nanjing circulated among Shanghai officials “for reference.” The Nanjing Municipal Military Control Commission’s definition of the “other lawless elements” consisted of a list in ten points identifying nine subtypes. In a typically absurd fashion, the tenth point was a repetition of the very term that the list was supposed to define, thus preserving a measure of constructive ambiguity in the administration of looted goods.

79 Beijing hangkong xueyuan hongqi zhandoudui, “Zhou zongli dui Beijing shi hongweibing daibiao de jianghua.” 80 Zhou, Zhou Enlai xuanji, II:450–51. 81 Jiedai tongxun, no. 48 (August 9, 1967), 2

172 The Nanjing list was an amalgam of interim rules and exceptional norms that had come

about in the Cultural Revolution. Five out of the nine types on the list were from the “Six

Articles on Public Security” (Table 4.2).82 The Party Center had issued this document to-

gether with the State Council in January 1967 to signal the restoration of law enforcement

as the ﬁrst revolutionary committees were established. The “Six Articles” became one of the

principal sources for handling political offenses and ordinary crimes when the fall of senior

ofﬁcials of the judiciary and public security in the Cultural Revolution put the legitimacy

of earlier legislation in question. Two of the four remaining types on the Nanjing list re-

lated to crimes punishable before the Cultural Revolution (8) and the ongoing purge of the

bureaucracy (9). Most controversially, the Nanjing list added capitalists (1) and religious

leaders (5) to those excluded from restitution. In so doing, Nanjing better represented the

realities of the house raids, but it did so at the expense of subverting the principles of the

United Front.

82 The actual title of the document commonly referred to as the “Six Articles on Public Security” (公安六条 gong’an liutiao) was “Guanyu zai wuchan jieji wenhua da geming zhong jiaqiang gongan gongzuo de guiding” 关于在无产阶级文化大革命中加强公安工作的规定 (Regulations on Strengthening Public Security Work during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution), available in MLD: 2092. For an overview of law in the Cultural Revolution that stresses the normative importance of this document, see Xu, “Beyond ‘Destruction’.”

173 Table 4.2: Nanjing’s taxonomy of ”other lawless elements” in comparison

Six Articles? United Front targets? Nanjing Municipal Military Control Commission (Y/N) (Y/N)

1. Capitalists and property owners who maintain a reactionary stand- N Y point and have engaged in anti-party and anti-socialist words and deeds

2. Backbone elements of reactionary parties and organizations as well as Y N enemy and puppet soldiers (company commanders and above), government ofﬁcials (baozhang1 and above), police (commissioner and above), military police, and tewu2 who have not been punished as counterrevolutionaries but maintain a reactionary standpoint

3. Elements displaying bad conduct after completion of their sentence, Y N release from reform through labor, or release from guanzhi3

4. Family members of counterrevolutionaries (who have been killed, im- Y N prisoned, placed under guanzhi, or ﬂed abroad) who maintain a reactionary standpoint

5. Religious clerks who maintain a reactionary standpoint and use reli- N Y gion for anti-party, anti-socialist activities

6. Mid- and low-level leaders and professional organizers of reactionary Y N societies and cults who maintain a reactionary standpoint

7. Corrupt and thieving elements, speculators and proﬁteers4 Y N

8. Irreformable elements who have severely broken the law, engaged in N N hooliganism, committed theft, or engaged in exploitation over a long period of time

9. Those people in positions of authority within the party who take N N the capitalist road, counterrevolutionary revisionists, and bourgeois- reactionary“authorities”in academia who have already been placed under investigation as cadres

10. Other reactionary and lawless elements N N

(1) Ofﬁcial in charge of local community organization and public security before 1949. (2) Operative or asset of hostile intelligence services; the term was often used indiscriminately for any person suspected of links to external enemies. (3) A punitive restriction of liberty where the person was not sent to prison or labor camp but remained under supervision in the local community. (4) The ”Six Articles” mention ”speculators and proﬁteers” but not ”corrupt and thieving elements.” Source: ” 关于处理查抄财物的具体政策规定” Guanyu chuli chachao caiwu de juti guiding [Regulation on concrete policies regarding the handling of looted goods] reprinted in Jiedai tongxun, no. 48 (August 9, 1967), 2. The Nanjing list gave a tentative answer to the question that the Party Center was unwilling to answer “for the time being”: the right to restitution for persons who belonged

neither to the “masses” nor the “enemy.” This pertained to the central distinction in Maoist

statecraft between the ﬁeld of antagonistic contradictions (“between the enemy and us”)

and the ﬁeld of non-antagonistic contradiction (“contradictions among the people”). The

ﬁrst was the ﬁeld of law—dedicated to the suppression of counterrevolutionary and anti-

social deviance—the other was the ﬁeld of tolerable diversity that had been the purview

of the United Front. This distinction broke down in the summer of 1966. A revolutionary

couplet appearing on Nanjing Road celebrated the raids with the following lines: “When

the ﬁve red types hear the sound of house raids their spirits rise and they celebrate it; When

the six black types hear the sound of house raids they are spooked out of their minds and

their pants ﬁll with shit”; the corresponding horizontal line summarized: “The house raids

are justiﬁed” (抄家有理 chaojia youli).83 Although Mao condoned, even supported, this

manichaen view in the initial phase of the movement, he never abandoned the distinction

between two types of contradictions and as soon the Cultural Revolution moved into its

corrective phase he backed the progressive restoration of United Front Work institutions.

4.6 Restitution in the corrective mode

In July 1967, the Shanghai Group for Handling Conﬁscated Property described capitalists

as “targets awaiting handling” (待处理对象 dai chuli duixiang).84 But by the end of the year,

it had issued a speciﬁc policy on looted goods belonging to “bourgeois elements” which

meant that the capitalist case for restitution was considered separately from that of the ﬁve

disenfranchised types listed in Document No.107.85 In large part, the new distinction re-

mained symbolic as the policy was more generous only for capitalists who had returned

from overseas and for small proprietors. It was only after the Communist Party’s Ninth

83 Quoted in Jin, “Beijing hongweibing zai Shanghai (xia),” 120. 84 MLD: 5548, 26 85 MLD: 5554

175 Congress in April 1969 that the Cultural Revolution switched into a corrective mode. A public communiqué announced that the Ninth Congress convened “at a time when the Great

Proletarian Cultural Revolution personally initiated and led by Chairman Mao has won great victory.”86 Although the Ninth Congress did not bring an end to the violent persecution associated with the Cultural Revolution, it was accompanied by a gradual restoration of core party institutions—including the United Front.

As early as July 1968, two ofﬁcers of the People’s Liberation Army took charge of su- pervising United Front operations on the national level.87 The month before, Zhang Chun- qiao had personally authorized the creation of a provisory United Front Work Group in

Shanghai—led by Feng Guozhu, the man who had led the rebels against the city’s now defunct United Front Department—which set up ofﬁce on the Bund.88 At the time it was a small outﬁt with limited capacity. And yet, it set out as a priority the review of conditions among the city’s national bourgeoisie. The following year, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao

Wenyuan ﬂew down from the capital to oversee two meetings on how to improve policies covered by the United Front.

On February 7, 1971, the Party Center issued a second document on restitution that reﬂected the preferential treatment of the national bourgeoisie and other members of the

United Front.89 Once again, the Central Document contained a report with a local example on how to deal with conﬁscated property, but this time the report was not from some town in the southwest but from Beijing itself. Restitution efforts, the report afﬁrmed, needed to accurately distinguish between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions. Conse- quently, members of the United Front should not be treated as outcast elements but were eligible for restitution. Some restrictions nevertheless applied. Capitalists with considerable bank savings were not to be granted full access to their accounts. Again, this was a

86 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 285. 87 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, 96. 88 SHMA: A33-3-1, 3. Materials from the shutdown of the Shanghai United Front Department in 1966 and the restoration in 1968 are scarce, but there is evidence that Feng Guozhu convened a meeting of representatives from various rebel groups to discuss the past and future of the United Front in November 1967 and again in March 1968, SHMA: A33-6-9 89 MLD: 2179; other copies of this document circulate with small variations, cf. ECNU: EN 0351-204-172

176 decision “for the time being.”

Following Mao’s endorsement of this new line, former rebels in the provinces found

themselves in the awkward position of having to defend the restitution of capitalists. Six

months after the new Central Document, Wang Hongwen, newly appointed secretary in the

restoredShanghaiPartyCommitteewhoowedhispositiontoapastasarebelleader, madea

curious case for improving the material standards for capitalists and bourgeois intellectuals:

“[T]o restore the original salaries of bourgeois intellectuals and, with only a few

exceptions, to generally grant restoration [of salaries] to capitalists is required

for class struggle and for consolidating proletarian dictatorship, [our] present

goal is to expropriate the bourgeoisie’s political capital (政治资本 zhengzhi ziben)

and also to reﬂect the policy considerations of ‘bringing up,’ ‘taking care of,’ and

‘giving a way out.’ In handling problems, we must keep politics in mind.”90

Wang’s comments came at a pivotal meeting of the Shanghai Party Committee on the

policy toward the national bourgeoisie. By suggesting a negative relationship between per-

sonal income and political capital, Wang was able to argue in favor of restoring salaries that

had been docked in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution.91 Although Wang saw ﬁt

to cap the capitalists’ salaries at 150-200 yuan per month, this was still two to three times

the monthly wages of a Shanghai worker.92 Well aware that the decision to restore salaries was a controversial one, Wang spent as much time stressing the historical contribution of

the Red Guards as he did explaining why it was time now time to restore salaries that had

been cut on their demand.

In addition to the switch to a corrective mode, the restoration of the United Front should

be understood in the context of China’s global realignment. The ﬁrst years of the 1970s saw

the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations and a tentative rapprochement with the United

90 MLD: 5555, 2 91 Wang borrowed this argument from Mao who had made a comment at the Chengdu conference of 1958 to the effect that the Redemption Policy, that is maintaining the national bourgeoisie’s high salaries and dividends, was the best way to deprive the capitalists of political capital, Mao, “Zai Chengdu huiyi shang de chaihua,” 54. 92 MLD: 5555, 3

177 States—the impetus for which was the threat of war with the Soviet Union actualized by the

1969 border clashes—which led up to Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. That there was a clear instrumental reasoning behind restitution is clear from the fact that the hierarchical organization of restitution came to match the institutional hierarchy of the United Front.

In May 1972, Huang Jinhai, the head of the Shanghai Finance and Trade Group, endorsed the restitution of capitalists (with a continued exception for “reactionary” members of the bourgeoisie).93 He relayed the Shanghai Party Committee’s decision that capitalists were now eligible for restitution up to three thousand yuan, corresponding to about four years’ worth of wages for a local worker. But this cap did not apply to capitalists who were also members of the People’s Congress, the CPPCC, or representatives of the democratic parties on the municipal level and above. These high-ranking capitalists, a group of about 160 persons, received up to ten thousand yuan.94 That China’s image to the outside world was a consideration when deciding on restitution was even more clear in the policy toward the overseas Chinese who were one of the ﬁrst groups to be singled out for complete restitution.95

Three of the members in the Gang of Four held high positions within the Shanghai administration. As a leading member of the Gang, Wang Hongwen was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1981. Huang Jinhai, as one of the its alleged henchmen in Shanghai, was given a ﬁfteen-year sentence the following year. In the period leading up to these verdicts, the Gang of Four was accused of having sabotaged Shanghai’s United Front Work. In July

1977, members of the Central Work Team that had been sent to Shanghai to take over control following the Gang of Four’s arrest the year before reported that restitution in the city compared unfavorably to that of cities like Beijing and Tianjin.96 Shanghai’s cap for restitution at three thousand was signiﬁcantly lower than the cap at ten thousand in the two other cities. Suddenly, restitution became a matter of righting the wrongs committed by the Gang

93 MLD: 5556 94 MLD: 5556; see also SHMA: A33-6-12, 55 95 MLD: 2177 96 SHMA: A33-6-12, 55

178 of Four. Shanghai took immediate steps to return the extra seven thousand renminbi—a

policy shift that beneﬁted a group of almost eight thousand capitalists.97

Although members of the Gang of Four had voiced strong support for the house raids,

and even taken advantage of the situation for their own vendettas, the claim that they sab-

otaged the policy of restitution is highly questionable. To begin with, there was nothing

particularly malicious or unreasonable in setting the cap at three thousand rather than ten

thousand. Especially since there had not been any clear policy on the matter at the time.

In the last years of Mao’s life, the party leadership had been divided and rarely taken a

clear stance on speciﬁc policy issues. Besides, it is unclear if such caps were even strictly

enforced at the time.98 Dubious as they may be, the accusations against the Gang of Four were important in that they signaled the state’s recognition of the house raids as a general wrong. When the house raids were associated with the crimes of the Gang of Four and

the historical injustice of the Cultural Revolution, the link that had connected class status

to belonging and entitlement was broken. By the time the Gang of Four was put on trial,

restitution had been generalized to all victims of looting and there was no longer any doubt

that the house raids had been, in the prosecutor’s words, illegal.

4.7 What does it mean to chuli the past?

One word occurs over and over in the paper trail left behind from the house raids: 处理

chuli. This all-purpose verb was used by the Chinese bureaucracy whenever there was a

“problem” that had to be “dealt with,” “handled,” or “processed.” The Shanghai Group

for Handling Looted Goods was in charge of the chuli of looted goods. Restitution and

compensation was only one aspect of this work albeit one that gradually came to dominate

the chuli of confiscated property. In the legal vocabulary from the Mao era, the same word was used by party officials and law enforcement officers alike who described their job as the

97 SHMA: A33-6-12, 55 98 Oneinformant, thesonofaprominenttraderinShanghaiwhowentontoholdakeypositioninthecity’sbureau for foreign trade, recalls making monthly withdrawals of ten thousand yuan after his father fell ill. Interview on March 12, 2016. For a complete transcript, see MLD: 1757

179 chuli of wrongdoing. In addition, chuli was used for the sanctions that befell the wrongdoers without any neat distinction between punishment and education. When Deng Xiaoping and his administration spoke of the lingering problems of the Mao era and the Cultural

Revolution, it was frequently in terms of chuli. Deng was impatient to close the book on the Cultural Revolution so that the nation could start “looking ahead.” To avoid delay, historical issues should be dealt with “broadly” and not in “detail” he told regional army commanders and provincial secretaries as soon as it was clear that he would take over the political leadership.99

Memoirs and show trials, testimonies and historical resolution all carry lessons about the past.100 But even the most “authoritative” and “scientiﬁc” narrative, which is how the

Chinese press describes the 1981 Resolution on Party History to this day, can never really

ﬁnish off the past. If we assume a view from above, historical injustice can be useful when mobilized against political opponents or foreign adversaries but otherwise it quickly turns into an inconvenience. It may be necessary to make some gestures toward coming to terms with the past, to let writers and artists address their “scars” and provide some outlet for people to ramble on about past “bitterness,” but any sustained effort is futile at best and becomes outright destabilizing if it suggests that old wrongs persist in the present. No wonder that historical justice appeared to Deng Xiaoping, once his position had been secured, a tedious question. Getting rid of tedious questions is precisely how Theodor Adorno criticized the German attempt at Aufarbeitung.“Aufarbeitung,” he argued, “does not imply a serious working through of the past, the breaking of its spell through an act of clear consciousness.

It suggests, rather, wishing to turn the page and, if possible, wiping it from memory.”101 As employed by Adorno, this term—which renders only awkwardly into English as “coming to terms” or “working through”—captures the promise of chuli to a Chinese Communist leadership who spoke of learning from past errors while promoting selective forgetfulness

99 Leng and Wang, Deng Xiaoping nianpu, 445. 100 For a classic discussion of law’s didactic function and a defense of the show trial as a political instrument, see Shklar, Legalism; and also Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law. 101 Adorno, “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” 115.

180 through historical censorship.102

Butthereisnoreasonforustoacceptthesordidaccountfromaboveastheonlyrealstory of historical justice and reconciliation following Mao’s death. As the show trial against Jiang

Qing and the “anti-party cliques” was coming to a close in Beijing, the China Handicraft

Import-Export Company in Shanghai was preoccupied with coming to terms with the past in a much more mundane sense of the phrase. The company had to move 138,000 jade and ivory decorations 112,000 pieces of calligraphy and some 75,000 other conﬁscated objects from its different storage facilities to a 700 square meter warehouse on Urumuqi North

Road.103 Following the move, responsibility for restitution fell on the Shanghai Group for

Sorting Cultural Relics and Books. In the ﬁnal instance, they would have been handed over to the Shanghai Museum, where the team responsible for restitution was overwhelmed by the sheer number of objects and struggled to match conﬁscated items with imprecise entries in the raid inventories. Consequently, most restitution was substitution-in-kind.104

From this point of view, it becomes clear that historical justice is as much about bureaucratic action as grand gestures and political spectacle. Unlike the show trial, restitution was not a carefully orchestrated propaganda event intended “to shape personal testimony into public experience, and if possible into a fully shared narrative.”105

But what were the conditions that make possible the transformation of public experience into a fully shared narrative? Without suggesting that the narrative ever became universal, it is nevertheless possible to say that restitution was conducive to such a metamorphosis, incomplete as it may have been. As Alf Lüdtke has argued in the context of postwar Ger- many: “Compensation is not conﬁned to solemn observances but relates responsibility and liability to people’s everyday context.”106 Although the “cash nexus” did not mean the same thing in the People’s Republic of China as in the Federal Republic of Germany, resti-

102 On the difﬁculties of rendering Aufarbeitung in English, see the translator’s preface to Adorno, “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” 103 SHMA: B170-3-801, 61, 76 104 Lu, “Seizing Civilization,” 315. 105 Cook, The Cultural Revolution on Trial, 105. 106 Lüdtke, “Coming to Terms with the Past,” 562.

181 tution and compensation nevertheless connected the grand narrative of historical justice to people’s everyday life in a material way.

The bureaucratic handling of looted goods offers several insights as to the successive evolution and transformation of the historical injustice that appeared fully formed at the trial and in the party resolution of 1981. First of all, it suggests a level of continuity that

ﬁts poorly with the ofﬁcial account of a clean rupture marked by the CCP Eleventh Central

Committee’s Third Plenum in December 1978. Although restitution expanded after Mao’s death, the policies and institutions were very much products of the Cultural Revolution.

Official historiography sacrifices the complex genealogy of restitution to produce a simple story of how the party broke with the past. It is symptomatic of the party’s obfuscation that the Shanghai chronicles give precise figures for the cultural relics and handicrafts (674,595) and books (2,360,740) returned up until November 1987 but mention no starting date.107

Equally convenient is the lack of explanation in ofﬁcial publications for the large discrepancy between the 2,730,000 items that the Shanghai Group for Sorting Cultural Relics and

Books returned or offered compensation for in the mid-1980s and the 3,320,000 items that it had collected in 1967-68.108

In some cases, at least, the scope of restitution was consequential before Mao’s death.

To take just one example, the Shanghai government had returned monetary assets to 33,000 out of an estimated 48,000 capitalist households targeted in the raids before 1975.109 Even disregarding the question of what was returned when, restitution in the late 1970s and early

1980s clearly depended on measures put in place to document and safeguard looted goods in 1967. Restitution would have been all but impossible without earlier paperwork, however imperfect, linking belongings to owners.

What was the story told through the chuli of looted goods? It was the story of wrongful

107 Zhonggong Shanghai dangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Zhonggong Shanghai dangzhi, 578; so entrenched is the idea that restitution began in earnest only after the Cultural Revolution that it has even found its way into the most authoritative scholarly treatments of the period, e.g. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 117. 108 Ho, Curating Revolution, 243. 109 SHMA: A33-4-100, 13

182 dispossession unfolding little by little through the redeﬁnition of the standards of entitle-

ment. As long as the Cultural Revolution was still an ongoing mass movement, restitution was heavily restricted. Only card-carrying members of the “revolutionary masses and toil-

ing people” could claim entitlement. But as the movement gradually entered its corrective

phase, the liminal but useful groups covered by the United Front became eligible for resti-

tution. Finally, the end to the revolutionary mode of politics after Mao’s death brought

about the expansion of the scope of restitution to all those who had been victims of raids

now deemed “illegal.” Still, the inclusion of all classes in the category of the people did

not change the fundamental justiﬁcation for restitution: dispossession was wrongful not

because it violated an inalienable right to property but because it infringed on the people’s

entitlement as set forth by the state.

183 5 Differentiation work

In May 1957, four peddlers from Beijing wrote a letter to Mao complaining that they were being bunched together with capitalists by salesclerks whose life had been far superior to their own before socialist transition: the latter had worn “coats and leather shoes” and treated themselves to “deep-fried dough sticks and noodles” whereas the peddlers had made due with “worn-out clothes” and “coarse food” while suffering constant harassment from the reactionary police.1 The petitioners were reacting to the arbitrary way that all who entered socialism from the so-called capital side were lumped together without any systematic distinction on the basis of value of assets or number of employees. Although party leaders would surely have considered their protest as sensible in principle—there was no ambiguity as to the theoretical division between petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie— they made the choice to disregard such objections at a time when they thought that the importance of class labels was rapidly diminishing (see Chapter 2). It was not until 1979, twenty-three years after socialist transition and three years after Mao’s death that Beijing approved the first official definition of what constituted a capitalist.2 It became the basis for a nationwide reclassification at the end of which China had lost over eighty percent of its capitalist population.

The 1957 letter to Mao and the 1979 central directive bring out two aspects of classiﬁca- tion. As should be clear at this point, the practice of class assignment was far more casual

1 “Xiaoshangfanmen yaoqiu bu yao ba tamen he zibejia yiyang kandai” 小商贩们要求不要把他们合资本家一样看待 (Small merchants and peddlers request not to be treated in the same way as capitalists). Neibu cankao, May 11, 1957. 2 MLD: 60

184 and diverse than it appeared to the scholars who based their analysis primarily on politi-

cal discourse. In addition, it was not the case that once assigned, class status was set for

all times. Only recently has the vast scope of reclassiﬁcation and its impact on the lives

of millions started to become clear.3 Given the importance of class as a basic structuring

principle, it is hardly surprising that reclassiﬁcation became an important part of life in Chi-

nese socialism. On the one side stood the classiﬁed who petitioned for the revision of a

label that, they would argue, did not accurately represent their past or else they protested,

like the four Beijing peddlers, that their treatment did not correspond to their assigned sta-

tus; on the other side, the classiﬁers who could change the shape of someone’s past with a

few strokes of a pen and the stamping of a form, and in so doing dramatically transform

the latter’s life in the present. City ofﬁcials wielded such discretionary power, it should be

recalled, with minimal involvement from higher levels of government.

The ofﬁcials who sorted people into classes were in the same business as the people’s

courts who classiﬁed crimes into “counterrevolutionary” and “ordinary” varieties. Both were agents of revolutionary justice. It was not just that many people suffered from the

state’s failure to recognize them for who they were, but the fact that an error of classiﬁcation

consigned them to a ranked position within the class status system. Matters of entitlement

could not be considered separately from assigned status as long as class remained a basic

structuring principle of society. Worse yet, classiﬁcation became a weapon in times of mass

mobilization when membership of a certain class made one a target of violence.

Reclassiﬁcation meant revising past errors, or what the Communist Party came to refer

to as ﬁxing policy. This chapter begins in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward when

a revival of the rhetoric of class struggle cleared the way for the Socialist Education Move-

ment. The new campaign saw work teams go down to the villages to tear up decisions on

class assignment made during land reform. A lesser known aspect of the movement, which

had the countryside as its focus, is that it brought renewed attention to the neglected issue

of urban class status. In the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards were left to expand the scope

3 Brown, “Moving Targets.”

185 of class struggle in the cities to previously protected groups. Capitalists were now treated as class enemies. This provides context for the second part of the chapter, which turns to an experiment in classifying capitalists at a Beijing timber mill in 1969. This experiment has received scant attention from historians despite being at the origins of a nationwide reclassification of capitalists that did not conclude until 1981. Eventually, reclassification served as an instrument of depoliticization, with class identities becoming nothing more than a heritage of the revolutionary past without practical significance for China’s new developmental path.

5.1 Urban repositories of ﬁlth

Interest in class tended to exhaust itself when matters strayed too far away from that supreme question which had introduced Mao’s ﬁrst substantial work on the subject: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?”4 Chinese Communist leaders may have varied in the degrees of weight they attached to the role of class under socialism, but they shared a concern for the security of the revolution and the state they had built. When Mao called upon comrades and compatriots never to forget class struggle he was making the point that the threat from the past had been written off prematurely. The return to class rhetorics in the second half of 1962 marked the end of a brief discussion about the origins of the famine that had devastated the country, for which Mao had assumed partial responsibility months earlier, and the beginning of a project to educate the younger generation about the injustices of the past and raise society’s vigilance concerning the threat of restoration by the reactionary classes.5

The Socialist Education Movement (1962–1966) put class back at the top of the agenda.

In a rare academic exchange on the subject of class assignment, scholars from the Chinese

Academy of Science suggested that errors had been made during land reform by local activists and village ofﬁcials who had confused class identity and ideological standpoint; ide-

4 Mao, “Analysis of All the Classes in Chinese Society,” 249. 5 Wemheuer, “Dealing with Responsibility.”

186 ology, these academics argued with the help of one of Mao’s visceral word images was only a thin layer of skin covering the flesh and bones of class.6 Rephrased with more prosaic terms, the problem to which they were referring was one of which the directors of land reform had been well aware: class assignment inevitably became an instrument to punish those who opposed the new village hierarchies that emerged through land reform or simply a means to settle old scores.7 Following a revision of the movement’s guiding document in September 1964, the work teams who had descended on the villages to discipline rural cadres began revising earlier class assignment to uncover hidden class enemies.8 In the cultural domain, the party promoted amateur literature that “recalled the bitterness” of the past and class education exhibitions that put the horrors of exploitation and oppression on prominent display.9 Some places even saw attempts, through a more or less coordinated establishment of local pilots, to extend the official taxonomy of class to incorporate socio-economic relationships ignored by land reform. New class labels were designed for pastoral communities in Inner Mongolia while Shanghai officials made an effort to sort out class divisions among the fishermen of Dianshan Lake.10 In Hubei the provincial leadership convened in the summer of 1963 to discuss the long-neglected issue of urban classification.11

6 Geng and Zhang, “Jingji diwei shi huafen jieji de weiyi biaozhun”; which criticized the minority opinion of philosopher Nan Zhewen that political opinion could be used as a secondary criteria in the consideration of class status, in “Jieji shi chuncui de jingji fanchou ma?”; which in turn expanded on a theoretical piece on the dialectical materialism of class analysis by Beijing philosopher Dai Qingliang, see “Jieji fenxi de weiwu bianzhengfa.” 7 In Ren Bishi, standing member of the Politburo, had insisted that the relation to the means of production should be the only criteria for determining class status, with the notable exception of revolutionary soldiers and party officials, see Ren, “Genju shenme biaozhun lai huafen nongcun jieji.” 8 Brown, “Moving Targets,” 59–60. 9 Guo, “Recalling Bitterness”; Ho, Curating Revolution, 138–73. 10 In 1964, several pilot sites were set up among communes in Inner Mongolia, see Xing, Jiang, and Su, Nei Menggu wenhua da geming tongzhi, 52, 57. At one such site the sent-down work team spent over a month on devising a taxonomy to classify the members of a single production brigade before designating fifty-nine households as “poor herders” and another thirty-one as “non-rich herders.” The classification of five households as “bayan (chief herder)” is testament to the compromises that had to be made in the attempt at standardization; the local reality of the Mongolian term bayan is here superficially preserved through transliteration but immediately rendered meaningless through its equation with the more standard term “chief herder” (which designated someone who employed other herders to care for their animals and consequently could be equated with landlord), see Wushen qizhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Wushen qizhi. For the work on class assignment by Dianshan Lake, see Zhonggong qingpu xianwei dangshi yanjiushi, Zhonggong qingpu dangshi dashiji, 442. 11 “Zhonggong Hubei shengwei chengshi huafen jieji chengfen shidian zuotanhui wenjian” 中共湖北省委城市划分阶级成分试点座谈会议文件” (Documents from the CCP Hubei Provincial Committee Forum on the Pilot for Urban Division of Class Status), July 1963. In Hubei Provincial Archives, SZ 1- 3- 383. Although I have not personally seen this document, I have found evidence of officials in the provincial capital of Wuhan referring

187 In the early 1960s, the Shanghai government similarly took measures to correct for a con-

flation between capitalists and small-scale business owners by reclassifying 39,000 persons who practiced nothing more than “slight exploitation.”12 The annals of the Shanghai Peo- ple’s Government cites a need to correct for discrepancies in the creation of public-private joint management firms as the reason for reclassification.13 It was a belated response to a campaign that had concluded in 1956. What drove Shanghai and Hubei to concern themselves with class assignment at this particular time? Clearly, it had something to do with

Mao’s revival of class rhetoric in 1962. But there was no direct link between the struggle against class enemies that occupied Mao’s mind and motivated the hunt for landlords who had “slipped through the net” and the separation between capitalists and non-capitalists.

The latter distinction was not related to the line between friend and enemy. It is perhaps more likely, therefore, that the two regions reviewed their procedures for classiﬁcation at a moment when it was becoming clear that the class status system would endure for the foreseeable future. In any event, it would take another few years, and a cultural revolution, before the matter of capitalist class status received closer attention.

Only when the issue of urban class was framed in the language of security did it receive any political weight. When the Thirteenth National Public Security Conference convened in February 1964, the discussion of classiﬁcation centered on how to improve surveillance and control over the “four or ﬁve percent” of the population deemed hostile to socialism.14

As the conversation continued at the Central Ministry of Public Security in the months following the conference, the alarming lack of data from the cities received special attention:

The streets of the cities, especially small market towns, have always been a place

where dirt stores up and ﬁlth gathers [藏垢纳污 canggou nawu]; where the in-

to it in the evaluation of capitalist class status, see Engman, “Vetting the People’s Servant.”, 109. 12 Shanghai renmin zhengfuzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Shanghai renmin zhengfuzhi, 317. 13 Shanghai renmin zhengfuzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, 317. 14 ECNU: En 0351-204-177. A bureaucratic tradition that dated back to the founding of the People’s Republic of China demanded that the ratio of enemies be estimated at about five percent of the population. This figure corresponded to the ninety-five percent of the population that the Communist Party aimed to unite following its victory in 1949. Here, the immediate source for the estimation of “four or five percent” is Mao’s speech at the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, see Mao, “Zai kuoda de Zhongyang gongzuo huiyi shang de jianghua.”, 18

188 ﬂuence of reactionary classes and the lingering residue of the Old Society are

relatively concentrated. After Liberation, there was additionally many counter-

revolutionaries and bad elements ﬂeeing from the countryside as well as the

counterrevolutionaries and bad elements that have been ferreted out from the

inside [of the administration]. Moreover, overall there has been no systematic

class struggle-mass campaign launched in cities and towns. And overall there

has been no segregation of class status; the class lines are very unclear. It seems

that getting to the bottom of the situation in neighborhoods and market towns as

well as the various types of bad persons through the Socialist Education Move-

ment is extremely important; the task will also be a bit more difﬁcult [than in

the countryside].15

The Ministry described a serious failure in urban policy dating back to the founding of the People’s Republic. From the moment that the Communist Party entered the cities, it had put public order and industrial production before class struggle (see Chapter 1). The discussions at the Central Ministry of Public Security articulated two problems with this policy. First, the draconian measures put in place to police the division between city and countryside had failed to keep the cities “pure”—class enemies had found refuge in the cities from both land reform and institutional purges. The situation was all the more serious because, second, there had been no systematic assignment of classes in the cities.

In May 1964, Mao told four vice premiers that the time had come for class assignment in the cities. But he added: “As for how such class lines should be drawn, criteria must be formulated when we come to do this work. We cannot take account only of class status

[唯成分论 wei chengfen lun]. Neither Marx, Engels, Lenin, nor Stalin had working-class family origins.”16 Those who were overly pedantic about class assignment risked losing

15 “Gong’anbu taolun duidi jieji fenzi de gaizao wenti” 公安部讨论对敌对阶级分子的改造问题 (Ministry of Public Security discusses the issue of reforming hostile class elements). Neibu cankao, June 12, 1964 16 Quoted in Schram, “Classes, Old and New, in Mao Zedong’s Thought, 1949-1976,” 45. Stuart Schram adds the word “inherited” before class status, which makes the sentence consistent with the reference to family class origins that follows. Confusion of the two terms was widespread and Mao was not above such terminological errors.

189 the point. Later in the year, Mao spelled it out clearly: “The main thing in dividing classes is to ferret out the bad elements.”17 The purpose of class assignment, in this view, was not to distinguish one class type from another, say a capitalist from a petty merchant, through a uniform and standardized procedure but to identify and isolate threats.

The Central Ministry of Public Security had put its trust in the Socialist Education Move- ment to clear up problems of urban classification, but just as the campaign was arriving to the cities, Mao grew skeptical of its methods.18 The campaign remained fairly standard in the sense that it relied on intra-bureaucratic methods of rectification: cadres in one place formed work teams to identify “degenerate” and “class alien elements” hidden among cadres elsewhere. To deal with the existential threat of revisionism, however, Mao made use of his unparalleled authority to mobilize the younger generations in a rectification of the party organization from below in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

The fixation with filth was picked up by the Red Guards as they set out to “sweep away” the “olds” from the cities in the summer of 1966. Mao’s little janitors were as likely to depict violent actions as the uprooting of poisonous weeds and elimination of parasites and pests as to render them as a heroic struggle against “ox-demons and snake-monsters.” Their vocabulary included labels that dehumanized their victims, making them appear weak and less than human, as well as terms of demonization that painted them out as dangerous threats.19 Such rhetorical devices justified the rapid progression of a movement that began by defacing shops and temples but had moved on to attacks on human beings within a few weeks. In Shanghai, adolescent students set up improvised “tribunals” where they denounced and beat up thousands of people.20

Still, the violence in Shanghai remained relatively mild in the early weeks of the movement. The Red Guards became more violent following the arrival of students from the cap-

17 Mao, “Guanyu huafen jieji wenti de zhishi,” 204; this short comment is undated but according to Stuart Schram it was almost certainly written in late 1964, Schram, “Classes, Old and New, in Mao Zedong’s Thought, 1949- 1976,” 46. 18 MacFarquhar, Origins, 428; Meisner, Mao’s China and After, 258. 19 Schoenhals, “Demonising Discourse in Mao Zedong’s China.” 20 Shanghai wenge shiliao bianzuan xiaozu, Shanghai wenge shihua, 100.

190 ital, who incited more radical action, and especially the start of house raids in the second

half of August.21 According to an internal report to the municipal leadership in October

1966, which recorded violent incidents at the time of the house raids, 11 persons committed

suicide or been beaten to death and 584 had been injured.22 There were no full-on massacres

of class enemies in Shanghai in the summer of 1966. In this respect, the city differed from

Beijing where two separate mass killings in the city’s outskirts claimed over six hundred

lives.23

Marked differences in the degree of violence notwithstanding, lively exchanges between

student groups from different cities ensured a coherence in terms of how the targets were

chosen. In Shanghai, again judging from the party’s internal updates on the movement,

the “four black types” (landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, and bad elements) were most likely to be beaten up and sustain injuries as a result of violence, with teaching

staff being a close second. Together with capitalists, the third most frequent target, members

of these groups made up over half of the 6,665 who were beaten or brutalized in the summer

of 1966.24 Violence toward these “black types” was justiﬁed as a way to purify the cities so

as to render them “pure and clean as crystal.”25

When the Ministry of Public Security warned about urban ﬁlth and when Red Guards

spoke of crystal-clean streets, they were addressing the presence in the cities of reactionary

elements that did not belong. Filth was something that was out of place, a residue from old

society that polluted the privileged, almost sacred, urban space. In the People’s Republic

of China, the past was rural and so was the space in which reactionaries belonged. The

most straightforward measure available to clean up the city was therefore the banishment of

unwanted elements to the countryside. Between August and mid-September, some 77,000 were banished from Beijing.26 Among these, there were 37,000 members of the “ﬁve black

21 Jin, “Beijing hongweibing zai Shanghai”; Li, Geming zaofan niandai. 22 Jin, “Beijing hongweibing zai Shanghai,” 101. 23 Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, 54; Leese, Die chinesische Kulturrevolution, 49; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 128–31. 24 Jin, “Beijing hongweibing zai Shanghai,” 101. 25 Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, 65. 26 Wu, 66.

191 types” (which added rightists to the list) and 5,500 capitalists. Shanghai soon followed the capital’s example and, by October 10, over 9,000 “reactionaries” had been banished from the city.27

Rebellious students and urban bureaucrats alike treated the countryside, in Jeremy

Brown’s words, as “part prison, part garbage dump.”28 The fact that the countryside did not actually want all the city’s criminals and reactionaries—a poster in Nanhui county in the rural outskirts of Shanghai complained that peasants were treated like “second-class citizens” and their home a “general rubbish heap”—barely registered.29

Rhetorically, the Cultural Revolution was all about class struggle. In the summer of

1966, the movement targeted old class enemies but in the fall it grew into a frontal assault on the party bureaucracy. Maurice Meisner argues that Mao launched the Cultural Revo- lution after arriving at “a conclusion that no other Communist in power had hitherto been willing to entertain,” namely that socialism would generate its own inequalities and the bureaucracy, if left to its own devices, would form a new exploiting class.30 Against the popular idea that the purpose of the Cultural Revolution was to counter the emergence of a new class of bureaucrats, Wu Yiching convincingly argues that ideology was far less coherent than earlier studies have let on and that it became further fragmented as class rhetoric was extended in the movement in opposition to just about all social ills.31 When people learned to speak the language of class, they did not use it only for criticism of party leaders and factional opponents, but also to bring attention to a wide range of circumstances that should not be. When the early Red Guard groups in Shanghai and elsewhere limited their membership to children of revolutionary bloodlines or banished “black types” to the countryside, they were reacting to some of the blatant inconsistencies, or injustices, of the socialist system.

The Red Guard movement was not homogenous. If early groups made class a condition

27 Shanghai wenge shiliao bianzuan xiaozu, Shanghai wenge shihua, 102. 28 Brown, “A Policeman, His Gun, and an Alleged Rape,” 137. 29 Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, 112–3. 30 Meisner, Mao’s China and After, 306. 31 Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, 21.

192 for participation, other groups admitted students with an unfavorable family origins and

pushed back against the conception of the Cultural Revolution as a showdown between

students with a “red” and “black” background.32 Most famously, Yu Luoke argued in “On

Class Origins,” which appeared in a student pamphlet in January 1967, against discrimina-

tion based on family class origins which he likened to the oppression of black people in the

United States and the treatment of untouchables in India and Japan.33 Conduct and not the

family’s position in the old system should determine one’s fortune in socialism. The ofﬁ-

cial language of class proved ﬂexible enough to sustain criticism of the class status system

itself. Mao had taken issue with a single-minded focus on class status and Stalin famously

said “a son does not answer for his father.”34 Although Yu used a familiar vocabulary,

his extension of ofﬁcial principles to their logical and radical limits went beyond the realm

of acceptable dissent.35 He was sentenced as an active counterrevolutionary and publicly

executed on March 5, 1970.

Itself a violent reaction to political crisis, the Red Guard movement was ended by an

even more violent counteraction. After rebel forces seized power in Shanghai in January

1967 the battles between rivaling factions gave way to a more familiar mode of violence:

state-sponsored terror. By the end of the year, the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, the

city’s new ruling body, launched an immense hunt on traitors and counterrevolutionaries:

the Cleansing of the Class Ranks. In comparison to the public beatings and street battles,

this violence was more contained, but far more deadly. According to ofﬁcial statistics over

ten thousand people died in Shanghai as a consequence of violence and persecution in the

Cultural Revolution.36 Most of these casualties likely occurred over a twelve-month period

starting with the launch of the Cleansing of the Class Ranks in late 1967.

32 Leese, Die chinesische Kulturrevolution, 52–57. 33 Yu, “On Family Background,” 32. 34 Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class,” 758. 35 Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, 86. 36 The organizational history of the Communist Party in Shanghai states that 13,200 people died in the city as a result of the Cultural Revolution, Zhonggong Shanghaishi zuzhishi ziliao bianshen lingdao xiaozu, Shanghai shi zuzhishi ziliao, 521; an unpublished party history of the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai gives 11,510 “unnatural deaths” for the same period, Shanghai wenge shiliao bianzuan xiaozu, Shanghai wenge shihua, 428; for a listing of major factional battles in the city, see Li, Geming zaofan niandai, I:853–6.

193 Those who lost their lives in the Cleansing of the Class Ranks often did so away from the eyes of the public.37 They were beaten or tortured to death by investigators from the Case

Examination Ofﬁces—set up to examine supposed crimes of counterrevolutionaries and class enemies—or shot in summary executions. Others still died of untreated disease in pris- ons run by the army or committed suicide following sustained mental and physical abuse in “conveyor-belt interrogations” or equally drawn-out and brutal “study sessions.”38 Ac- cording to ofﬁcial records, as many as 5,449 persons were “persecuted to death” before

December 1968 in direct relation to the investigations of the Shanghai Case Examination

Ofﬁce.39 Shanghai was by no means an exception. A survey of recorded casualties across all provinces indicates that the actions of military and civilian authorities after the establishment of revolutionary committees were responsible for the vast majority of deaths.40

With the reinstatement of the state’s monopoly on violence came the restoration of its mandate to classify. Even before revolutionary committees had been established in many places of the country, the Party Center issued a series of orders not just to strengthen police authority, but also to restrict access to the archives and restore control over internal flows of information.41 Thus ended the unprecedented access to internal communication and state archives that student and worker rebels had relied upon for “black materials” to use in their attacks on party officials and rival factions. As the Cleansing of the Class Ranks unfolded, policy became more important than rebellion. The party press and state broadcasters reminded everyone that they had to “take note of policy” (注意政策 zhuyi zhengce) and then to “fix policy” (落实政策 luoshi zhengce) in line with the spirit of the Communist Party’s

Ninth Congress in April 1969.42 The Ninth Congress marked an important shift, even if

37 Schoenhals, “The Central Case Examination Group, 1966-79.” 38 For a case study of a Shanghai “study session” descending into violence, see Zhang, “From Denial to Apology.” 39 Zhonggong Shanghai dangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Zhonggong Shanghai dangzhi, 769. 40 Walder, “Rebellion and Repression in China, 1966–1971,” 521. 41 On public security see MLD: 2092; on safeguarding conﬁdential documents, MLD: 1670; and on the consultation of personal dossiers, MLD: 1675. 42 The standard formulation “take note of policy” was intimately associated with the Cleansing of the Class Ranks. The People’s Daily barely employed it before 1969 (on average it appeared in less than one article per year) when 204 articles contained this phrase, half of which explicitly referenced the Cleansing of the Class Ranks. Starting around the time of the Communist Party’s Ninth Congress, the term “ﬁx policy” became more common.

194 it did not become quite as decisive as originally intended. Mao meant for this congress

to mark the end of revolution. The ﬁrst public communiqué issued in the name of the

congress announced it was convening “at a time when the Great Proletarian Cultural Rev-

olution personally initiated and led by Chairman Mao [had] won great victory.”43 At the

time, this congress of victors appeared to herald the successful completion of the Cultural

Revolution—the forces of revisionism and counterrevolution were on the retreat.

Over the following years, military control commissions and revolutionary committees went through the vast number of accusations and labels produced by rebel groups and ag-

grieved petitioners in the earlier stages of the Cultural Revolution. Following a national

conference addressing, among other issues, the mass of letters sent to authorities from peo-

ple whose class status had been changed without any ofﬁcial involvement, the Heilongjiang

Revolutionary Committee spelled out the new line: “Any class status revised during the

Cultural Revolution—no matter if it was [revised] upward or downward—is invalid if it was not approved by a revolutionary committee at county-level or above; [in these cases]

the original class status applies.”44 But even before newer labels received scrutiny, there was the question of class assignment in the period before 1966 which had been overseen by

leaders who had in many cases fallen from grace in the Cultural Revolution.

5.2 The Beijiao Timber Mill

In 1969, ofﬁcials from all over the country looked to the Beijiao Timber Mill to ﬁgure out what they should do with the capitalists. Mao had selected this factory in Beijing as one

of six factories and one school (which became two schools when Beijing University was

added to Qinghua University) that would serve as models on rebuilding and reinventing

political institutions and techniques during the Cleansing of the Class Ranks.45 By the fall

43 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 285. 44 Heilongjiang sheng geweihui and Heilongjiang sheng minzhengju, “Guanyu chuli jieji chengfen wenti de yuanze.” The conference was followed by a directive from the Party Center that demanded that all errors in classiﬁcation be corrected and that ofﬁcials show generosity in ambiguous cases, see MLD: 2586 45 Teiwes and Sun, The End of the Maoist Era, 390; Wang, Da dongluan.

195 of 1967, it was already clear that the mass mobilization of the early stages of the Cultural

Revolution was giving way to a contest to determine who would be able to participate in the new order.46 In its ﬁrst year, the Cultural Revolution had been focused on tearing down existing structures but among the leaders who had survived the onslaught and those who it had brought to power there was little agreement as to what would replace the old order. The Six Factories and Two Schools became test sites for a circumscribed version of a movement that seemed, in hindsight, to have been more rectiﬁcation than revolution. They were not sites for free, revolutionary improvisation but closely supervised laboratories for new policies. The seizure of power at the Beijiao Timber Mill is a case in point: a smooth transition was guaranteed through the intervention of Wang Dongxing’s PLA Unit 8341, which otherwise served as the Politburo’s security detail.47

The Beijiao Timber Mill was where the Party Center sent Vice Premier Li Xiannian, shortly after the spring festival of 1969, as a punishment for his involvement in the so-called

February Countercurrent.48 Although Li was formally under the supervision of the masses, the deputy of the PLA Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team in control of the mill treated the high-ranking ofﬁcial more like a guest than a detainee.49 When the mill was tasked with preparing a report on how to deal with the problem of capitalists in its employ, it seemed only natural for the leaders to turn to the experienced Li for guidance. In collaboration with

Xinhua reporters stationed at the mill and backed up by Wang Dongxing’s guard regiment, the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team revised the report in line with Li’s comments and submitted it to Chairman Mao on April, 1969.

The report outlined recent measures to “ﬁx the party’s policies toward the national bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie” at the Beijiao Timber Mill.50 It started out by explaining the company’s history in order to explain how the capitalists had come to be a problem in

46 Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, 154. 47 Wang, Da dongluan, 244. 48 Li was among the leaders who faced heavy criticism at the CCP Eight Central Committee Twelfth Plenum in October 1968, MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 273–6. 49 Cheng, “Li Xiannian zai Beijiao mucaichang.” 50 MLD: 2079

196 need of ﬁxing. The Beijiao Timber Mill had been created as a public-private joint management ﬁrm in 1956 through the merger of over two hundred smaller workshops and mills.

Most of these had been small-scale operations with little in terms of workforce or capital.

This did not stop the Beijiao Timber Mill’s new management from classifying almost a ﬁfth of its workforce—252 out of a total of 1317—as capitalists. Over the years, the number of capitalist employees dwindled as a result of personnel transfers, retirements, and deaths.

By the start of the Cultural Revolution, there were only 83 capitalists left and another 39 self-employed artisans (小手工业主 xiao shougongyezhu). The Beijiao report explained how the remaining capitalists had weaseled their way into positions of authority with support from revisionists within the Communist Party. Especially damning was the charge that Bei- jing’s disgraced mayor Peng Zhen, who had been one of the ﬁrst senior ofﬁcials to fall in the

Cultural Revolution, had made the timber mill into a “black test site” to set up a retirement scheme with old-age pensions for capitalists.51

The criticism against the policies of the past served as a preface to the report’s twin objectives: to restore some of the capitalists lost entitlements and to separate actual capitalists from those who did not ﬁt the bill. The Beijiao report did not call for an end of the struggle against capitalists but for a reduction of its scope. It had been right to purge reactionary capitalists, but now it was time to end punitive salary cuts against capitalists who had not shown themselves to be hostile toward socialism. In this sense, the report was only one in a series of documents issued in the period after the Ninth Party Congress with the goal of restoring certain aspects of the party’s framework for sustaining and making use of marginalized groups.

What made the Beijiao report stand out was the description of how the mill had identi-

fied and reclassified persons who did not meet the expectations of a capitalist. As the first

51 The “black test site” possibly refers to the procedures that the Beijiao Timber Mill put in place following a meeting in May 1962, convened by the mill’s party secretary to discuss the implementation among of old-age pensions among private-side personnel, see BJMA: 126-001-00315, 161–169. If this is indeed the case, the accusations against Peng Zhen leaves out a crucial piece of information: while it is true that the Beijiao “test” preceded the State Council’s regulation on the matter—adopted in July the same year—the meeting followed— and indeed explicitly referred to—the March opinion from the Central United Front Department on which the State Council document was based.

197 and only such document to gain Mao’s approval, it outlined a procedure for reclassifying capitalists. It did not contain any explicit criteria but rather relied on a commonsensical understanding of what constituted a capitalist. In the place of standards, there were anecdotes meant to provide a recognizable image of how a case of misclassiﬁcation could look like.

The report mentioned personnel with a capitalist status who received dividend payments so low that they did not afford them more than “a few packs of cigarettes” and others who had relied mainly on their own labor in the past and never employed more than a couple of apprentices. At the Beijiao Timber Mill and later across China, such employees became known as “insufﬁciently capitalist” (不够资本家的 bugou zibenjia de).52

To mark his approval of the Beijiao report, Mao jotted down two words: “handle accordingly” (照办 zhaoban). With this comment and a few additional lines signed “the Center,” the report was handed over to the CCP Central Office on May 8 for circulation among the provinces. It was the twentieth Central Document issued in 1969 and the first ever to address the question of capitalist class status. Having paid little attention to the matter of class assignment during socialist transition (see Chapter 2), the central leadership had not done much more since to address the conflation of capitalists and non-capitalists in the creation of public-private joint management firms—not even the admonition “never to forget class struggle” and the Socialist Education Movement had moved the Party Center to act on this issue. So what had changed for Mao to think the time was right for a reclassification of capitalists? Clearly, it was not the case that the relevance of class was diminishing—the

Beijiao report was part of the Cleansing of the Class Ranks, which put class struggle front and center of political work. But as we have seen it was also a movement back to a more concentrated and formal taxonomic authority. With regards to the capitalist population in particular, the Beijiao report pointed toward a way out of a political deadlock dating back to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

The rebellion against the local bureaucracy in 1966 had upended established party norms but without establishing a viable alternative. For the capitalist population, this

52 MLD: 2079

198 meant the breakdown of the very institutions that had allowed capitalists to live in the

cities without access to the welfare reserved for the community of toilers. But the house

raids had left capitalist families in a state of precarity, made worse by ofﬁcial decisions to

dock salaries, discontinue dividend payments, and freeze bank accounts (see Chapter 4).

Taken together, these events meant that many capitalist families had insufﬁcient means to

sustain themselves. Without any decision from above on what to do with capitalists and

other groups who had come to depend on United Front institutions, the local bureaucracy was limited in the measures it could take to manage the situation.

The Central Document circulating the Beijiao experience called on large and mid-sized

cities—explicitly naming Shanghai, Tianjin, Wuhan, and Guangzhou—to “integrate the con-

crete situation, conduct surveys, and set up pilot sites.”53 In so doing, it offered a technical

means of escaping the deadlock of the policy toward the bourgeoisie. In the summer of

1966, a radical solution to the capitalist dilemma appeared, which not only found support

among workers and student rebels but also clearly resonated within the party, as capitalists

and other designated reactionaries were forced into rural exile. Mao, however, proved just

as unwilling to support this solution as to back the immediate restoration of United Front in-

stitutions that had sustained the capitalist population. The Beijiao alternative was a limited

restoration of the bourgeoisie’s special entitlements combined with a reclassiﬁcation effort

that would minimize the capitalist problem by way of reducing the capitalist population.

5.3 Shanghai and its insufﬁciently capitalist

In June 1969, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan left their work in the capital for Shanghai

to lead two meetings on the “ﬁxing” of United Front policy. No minutes are available from

these meetings, but the agenda can be partially pieced together from the criticism materials

that were compiled after the arrest of the Gang of Four, including both Zhang and Yao, in

late 1976. Much of the criticism relied on a tendentious reading of “evidence,” generally

53 MLD: 2079

199 in the form of citations taken out of context.54 With the ofﬁcial records out of reach, either lost or locked away in the archives, criticism materials can give us an idea of how Shanghai responded to the corrective push of the Ninth Congress. From a set of internal criticism materials compiled in Shanghai and submitted to the CCP Central United Front Department we can not only tell that the city took immediate steps to implement central policy but also get a sense of the topics under consideration, which included when and if religious activities could be resumed and what to do about the renowned writer Ba Jin and the actor Zhou

Xinfang both of whom had been conﬁned in their homes since their viliﬁcation in 1966.55

The policy toward the bourgeoisie was a priority. The discussion touched upon the restoration of salaries for capitalists and bourgeois intellectuals, the question of what sig- nified a “skilled” capitalist, and especially the implementation of the Beijiao report. In a comment for which he was later criticized but which was perfectly consistent with the party line set out in 1962, Zhang Chunqiao affirmed that the bourgeoisie would continue to exist as a distinct class for the foreseeable future. He thus did not enter new territory when he rejected the idea that the assimilation of the entire capitalist class was imminent. Nor was he alone in his qualified defense of the Red Guard movement: “that the revolutionary masses rose up to sort out the bourgeoisie was a great thing; [we] cannot reverse it. No matter how many mistakes the Red Guards made, this was a contribution.”56 All measures to “fix policy” in the period after the Ninth Congress shared the same basic assumption: the Cultural

Revolution had been a historical victory and however many transgressions committed during the movement they would always remain individual errors without any impact on the overall verdict.

Like other members of the Gang of Four, Wang Hongwen, the rebel leader who had a leading position in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution, was later depicted as someone who had opposed and sabotaged the Beijiao policy. On August 25, 1971, he chaired

54 For a reﬂection on the structure of criticism materials in the People’s Republic, see Cheek, Propaganda and Culture in Mao’s China, 290–91. 55 SHMA: A33-6-9, 35–49 56 SHMA: A33-6-9, 35–49

200 a key gathering of the newly reestablished Shanghai Party Committee. This Application

Meeting was dedicated to the city’s work toward the bourgeoisie and bourgeois intellectu-

als and, in particular, the adoption of the measures described in the Beijiao report.57 Ac-

cording to the later criticism materials, this meeting followed two years of planning by the

Gang of Four and their acolytes in Shanghai to devise their own warped policy toward the

bourgeoisie; they “resisted the policy regulations of Beijing’s Beijiao Timber Mill’s experi-

ence which Chairman Mao had personally commented and transmitted,” “openly opposed

Mao’s scientiﬁc judgment on China’s national bourgeoisie,” and “denied that the national

bourgeoisie had a dual character in the historical stage of socialism.”58 But without the ac-

cusers’ careful curation, the collected snippets from the Application Meeting, devoid of any

context, hardly justify such serious charges.

A handwritten copy of Wang Hongwen’s speech at the meeting, from the records of

the Xuhui District Political and Legal Affairs Group, gives an idea of what was on the Ap-

plication Meeting’s agenda. On the topic of how “upward classiﬁcation and downward

classiﬁcation” (划上划下 hua shang hua xia) should look in practice, he offered the following view:

The experience of Beijing’s Beijiao Timber Mill, which Mao approved with the

comment “handle accordingly,” mentions the issue of segregating some of the

insufﬁciently capitalist and treating them as small-scale proprietors. Aside from

this, to decide cases [定案 ding an] in the Cleansing of the Class Ranks also in-

volves the issue of grasping the policy to decide the status of capitalists who

have eluded classiﬁcation. Our opinion is that the work of upward classiﬁca-

tion and downward classiﬁcation is very policy-heavy, it must be handled pru-

dently and with a earnest understanding of the overall principle. [One] must

consider the facts established at the time of public-private mergers. Except for a

57 Originally, the application meeting (讲用会 jiangyonghui) referred to a speciﬁc meeting form used for the study of Mao’s works, in which the focus was on the participants own experiences and how they related the readings to concrete circumstances, see Leese, Mao Cult, 197. In context of the August 1971 meeting, the term appears to have been used generically as a fashionable gloss on what the party would otherwise have called a symposium. 58 SHMA: A33-6-9, 35–49

201 minority [of the class labels] that are clearly unreasonable and must be reclassi-

ﬁed, it is better not to change the majority. (Over 2000 yuan or three employees

count as a capitalist. Less than 2000 yuan or less than three employees count as

a small-scale proprietor—Interjection)59

The speech touched upon three aspects of reclassiﬁcation. In calling for simultaneous upward and downward classiﬁcation, Wang blurred the line between the Beijiao policy and the obsession of the Cleansing of the Class Ranks to hunt down reactionaries who had

“slipped through the net.” He also indicated that the scope of reclassiﬁcation should be restricted and that there should be no change of class status in borderline cases. The most interesting part of the speech, however, was when the unnamed ofﬁcial interrupted to spec- ify where to draw the line between a capitalist and a non-capitalist. Here was something as rare as an unambiguous standard for the assignment of capitalist status.

From where did the anonymous party ofﬁcial get the idea that a capitalist was someone with two thousand yuan in assets or three or more employees? It was not from any authoritative document on class status. No such criteria appeared in the Government Administra- tion Council’s decision from 1950, nor in any of the many handbooks that circulated among cadres in the 1960s and 1970s to guide them in matters of class assignment. However, it was not the Shanghai Party Committee inventing its own standard either. The cut-off line that separated the capitalist of meager means and the wealthy small proprietor was set at the same level of assets and same number of employees as in the pilot among the cotton wholesalers in Penglai district ﬁfteen years prior (see Chapter 2). But inspiration did not come from this forgotten pilot.

The answer comes from a report on Shanghai’s reclassiﬁcation of capitalists written two years after Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four. Looking back, the Shanghai

United Front Department explained that it had become customary in many places to draw the line between small-scale proprietor and capitalist at two thousand yuan and three em-

59 MLD: 5555. Although the handwritten copy of the speech quoted here dates it to August 15, this is in all likelihood a mistake and the speech the one from the Application Meeting on August 25, cf. SHMA: A33-6-13, 22–23

202 ployees. “This standard is not to be found in any formal document,” the department noted,

“but it has had a wide circulation.”60 As for the origin, it suggested two possibilities. One was a decision that ﬁrms with over three employees would be merged into public-private

joint management ﬁrms while smaller operations would form cooperatives.61 This was

based on a procedure designed for the early stages of socialist transition but which was

abandoned in favor of the industry-by-industry consolidation of ﬁrms of all sizes into large

public-private joint management enterprises in 1956. The other was that the standard had

been inspired by the State Council’s decision in 1957 that capital-side personnel with assets

over two thousand yuan were ineligible for paid sick leave as capitalists were expected to

get by on savings and dividend payouts.62

If applied, this standard would mean that a majority of Shanghai’s capitalists would be

reclassiﬁed. The reality that most of the city’s capitalists failed to meet the criteria for their

status ran contrary to Wang’s comment that only a small number of “clearly unreasonable”

labels were up for revision. Clearly, the intention was not to implement the standard in any

systematic fashion. In Wang’s own words, the ascription of class status should be based on

a “historically grounded and dialectical” analysis and take a range of factors into account.

While the primary criteria were the number of employees and value of assets, cadres in

Shanghai continued to factor in degree of participation in manual labor, source of income,

and length of the period of exploitation. Moreover, the ofﬁcial’s in charge also took a per-

son’s political conduct into account, which meant that class status continued to be used as

a sanction, an instrument of repression and revolutionary justice in the present, rather than

a simple indicator of past identity.

Reports from four pilot sites followed Wang’s speech at the Application Meeting. Party

representatives from Tongji University and the Shanghai Institute of Plant Ecology shared

the measures they had taken to better integrate, remold, and make use of bourgeois intel-

60 SHMA: A33-6-13, 20 61 Zhonggong shanghai shiwei dui zifang gaizao shi ren xiaozu, “Guanyu shehuizhuyi gaizao zhong ruogan wenti de chuli yuanze ji banfa (1),” 625. 62 SHMA: A33-6-13, 20

203 lectuals. Their counterparts at the Shanghai No. 2 Tire Factory and the Shanghai Company of Department Stores spoke of how they had implemented the party’s new line toward capitalist staff.63

The Shanghai Company of Department Stores had started out small with a pilot set up at the old market by the City God Temple—which incidentally was just a short walk from the Penglai district where the city had set up its first experiment in the classification of capitalists fifteen years prior—which had gone through a fundamental restructuring when the state took over control in 1956 and was since known as the Small Commodity Whole- sales Division. In 1971, this organization had 392 employees of whom 34 were classified as capitalists and 23 as petty merchants. In addition, it was responsible for 16 capitalist dependents.64 In other words, almost a fifth of the staff would be affected, directly or as family members, by changes in the division’s treatment of capitalists.

The Small Commodity Wholesales Division’s report to the Application Meeting made a direct comparison with the situation at the Beijiao Timber Mill. There were many simi- larities, it said, but one fundamental difference: the small proprietors at Beijiao had been self-employed artisans who had made a living from productive labor, unlike the petty merchants at the temple market. Even those with limited means had shown themselves, according to the Small Commodity Wholesales Division, to be “quite deceitful” and even those without full-time employees had been guilty of “quite heavy exploitation.” It may have been true that the majority had taken part in labor, but not all labor was equal. In the words of the report, “it is not the same to stand behind a counter as to pull a saw.”65 The party’s habitual disdain for the unproductive commercial sector thus became a reason to be more conservative with the reclassiﬁcation of merchant capitalists.

The Small Commodity Wholesale Division gave a far clearer description of its procedure of reclassification than the one from the Beijiao report. When examining the personnel files of its employees, the division’s officials mainly looked to determine the value and origin

63 SHMA: B123-8-1227, 1 64 SHMA: B123-8-1227, 9 65 SHMA: B123-8-1227, 9

204 of their capital, the length of the period of exploitation, and whether there had been any

compensation in form of ﬁxed-rate dividends. But the ofﬁcials also factored in political

conduct and whether the employee acknowledged that they had been exploiters or instead

attempted to cover up their past. After reviewing the background of its employees, the

Small Commodity Wholesales Division only considered three staff members to be “insuf-

ﬁciently capitalist.” Tan, the former owner of a small toy store, was one of the three. The

report’s summed up Tan’s professional background in a few words and added, reﬂecting

equal attention to “subjective” and “objective” criteria, that he had always displayed good

conduct.66

A peculiar result of the Shanghai’s decision to combine the Beijiao policy with a search

for capitalists who had “slipped through the net” was that the city combined upward and

downward revision of class status. At the Small Commodity Wholesales Division, a man

named Tang was found to be “a speculator-merchant wearing the coat of a salesclerk” and

“an out-and-out bourgeois element.”67 Tang had worked as a broker and clerk for a wool

trader before 1949, but on the side he had engaged in “speculative business” by investing

into other stores. His investments had been successful enough that his shares were valued

at almost twenty-ﬁve thousand yuan in 1956. Up until the discontinuation of dividend pay-

ments ten years later, he had received almost ten thousand yuan in compensation. Noting

his dishonesty and bad conduct, the division ofﬁcials changed his class status to capital-

ist.68 One more employee was reclassiﬁed as capitalist and another as a capitalist agent.

The reclassiﬁcation extended to the twenty-three small merchants too, four of whom had

their class status changed to reﬂect that they belonged to the working class rather than the

petty bourgeoisie. All in all, the net result of the Small Commodity Wholesales Division’s

experiment with reclassiﬁcation was a a reduction of capitalist staff by one.

Other places were more generous. The Shanghai Drug Company, which set up a pilot when the city expanded the reclassiﬁcation program beyond the four original sites, admit-

66 SHMA: B123-8-1227, 10 67 SHMA: B123-8-1227, 11 68 SHMA: B123-8-1227, 11

205 ted that it had never seriously considered the class labels of its capital-side personnel. It had excluded all capital-side personnel from political assemblies as if they were capitalists, which it reported had led to discontent both among the staff and their children who had written frequently to request that the company clear up their parents’ class status.69 After discussing the matter with workers’ representatives, the party bosses found that only three of the forty-six concerned employees qualiﬁed as capitalists.70

5.4 The nature of the Gang of Four’s “sabotage”

How to make sense of Shanghai’s reclassiﬁcation of capitalists in the years before Mao’s death? If later accusations are to be believed, the Gang of Four’s power over the city should have presented a formidable obstacle. Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao certainly spoke of the policy toward the bourgeoisie in a way that suggests caution or even reluc- tance. They were clearly careful not to put themselves in a position where their radical credentials could come in question. A comparison between Wang’s comments at the Ap- plication Meeting and those of Shang Xiangqian, the head of United Front work in the city of Hangzhou, suggests that it was possible to defend the change of capitalist class status in more assertive terms. Shang made an uncompromising case in favor of the party’s policy toward the bourgeoisie and the United Front. He took aim at those who “put on ultra-leftist airs” and went as far as to say that those who believed that “left is better than right” were wrong as both were deviations from the party line.71 Shang made his comments less than a year after Wang but in a political climate that had shifted radically following the attempt of

Mao’s designated successor, the PLA Marshal Lin Biao, to ﬂee the country with his family only to crash in Mongolia. The event was followed by a purge of army ofﬁcials in civilian position and their replacement by rehabilitated party cadres.72 The comparison of statements is a crude method for teasing out positions in a context of strict language discipline

69 SHMA: B123-8-1227, 36 70 SHMA: B123-8-1227, 38 71 HZMA: J133-001-192, 13-17 72 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 324–36.

206 and a volatile political climate.

Other qualitative evidence, while scare, suggest that Shanghai was not stalling and might even have taken the lead in matters of reclassiﬁcation. According to the recollections of the party ofﬁcial who took over as vice director of the CCP Shanghai United Front

Department in the 1980s, and who was typical in that he had little positive to say about his predecessors, Shanghai submitted two reports to the Party Center in the early 1970s on the subject of the bourgeoisie.73 None of these reports, it seems, were approved for wider circulation. And yet, the reports from the Application Meeting did circulate in other provinces as reference materials.74 That other local authorities should look to Shanghai for inspiration is consistent with the long-standing association of the city with matters that concerned the bourgeoisie.

By far the best indication of the Shanghai government’s attitude toward capitalist re- classiﬁcation comes from the results. Initially, these were far from impressive. In the year after the Lin Biao incident, the capitalist staff in Shanghai’s ﬁnancial and commercial sector had decreased by a mere three percent. The same year, the Industry and Transportation

Bureau reported that 244 capitalists had been reclassiﬁed as small-scale proprietors, but at the same time the hunt for those who had “slipped through the net” had produced 513 new capitalists. The result was that this sector saw a net increase of capitalist employees by 1.3 percent.75 Over the following years, however, the scope of classiﬁcation expanded.

By 1975, the city only counted 33,961 capitalists among the former private-side personnel as compared to 45,288 who did not meet the criteria.76 The reclassiﬁcation had turned into something quite different than what Wang Hongwen had introduced as the changing of a

“minority” of “clearly unreasonable” class labels.

The death of Mao and the arrest of the Gang of Four unexpectedly gave a second life to the policy toward the bourgeoisie and the project of reclassiﬁcation which had started at

73 Yin and Song, “Luoshi dang dui minzu zichanjieji zhengce,” 88. 74 SHMA: A33-6-9, 35–49 75 SHMA: A33-6-13, 25 76 SHMA: A33-3-85, 1. These ﬁgures are for Shanghai’s urban districts only; they do not include the rural counties that surround the city and which belong to the administrative region of Shanghai.

207 Beijiao. Although the charges against the Gang of Four in the unfolding criticism campaign were dubious in themselves, they were an important part in the justiﬁcation of the restoration and expansion of United Front work as the new Communist Party leadership sought a normalization of its ties with the First World. After the Third Plenum of the CCP Eleventh

Central Committee in December 1978, the reclassification of capitalists took on a new importance and reached an unprecedented scope around the country. In Shanghai, however, the new round of reclassification was largely a matter of reviewing and confirming earlier decisions. When it ended in 1981, the city had reviewed the status of 95,469 assigned capitalists and found that 61,617 fell short of the criteria; among the latter almost two thirds of had already had their class status changed before the new round of reclassification.77 These numbers, like the origins of reclassification at the Beijiao Timber Mill, fit poorly with the historical verdict against the Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution.

5.5 Getting rid of seven hundred thousand capitalists

Differentiation work (区别工作 qubie gongzuo) was the generic term used to denote a project that fundamentally restructured the capitalist population between 1979 and 1981. At its end, the reclassiﬁcation had reduced the number of capitalists in China from 860,000 to only

160,000.78 Given that an average household in one of China’s major cities had three or four inhabitants at the time, the great downward revision of the capitalist population affected seven hundred thousand people directly and about two million family members. Although the impact was signiﬁcant throughout the country, the effects varied between regions (Fig- ure 5.1). Large industrial cities tended to see somewhat smaller effects, presumably reﬂect- ing the fact that they had a more developed private sector in the 1950s with higher levels of capital. Still, there was only one city that truly stood out: Shanghai. In Shanghai, only

40 percent of the capitalist population was reclassiﬁed as compared to 82 percent on average. Even major cities like Beijing, Guangzhou, Tianjin, and Wuhan reclassiﬁed between 66

77 SHMA: C48-3-205, 137 78 MLD: 66

208 and 79 percent of their capitalist population. Like in the case of restitution, ofﬁcial statistics exaggerate the break with the past by conﬂating results obtained before Mao’s death with those that came after.

The Shanghai United Front Department’s leading role in differentiation work reﬂected the city’s earlier advances. The department acknowledged the importance of earlier results in a report written for a symposium convened by the CCP Central United Front Depart- ment in Beijing on December 16, only two days before the pivotal Third Plenum of the CCP

Eleventh Central Committee. The report stated:

In our opinion, a portion of Shanghai’s work units have already gone through

distinction [区分 qufen]; as a matter of fact, the foundation is currently present

for further uniﬁcation of standards and adjustment. A small portion have not

carried out distinction [so they] are in need of some distinction. This work has

to be meticulous and careful, and yet must not be pedantic and dragged-out; it

must not disturb the company leadership’s work to shift the main energy toward

realizing the Four Modernizations [i.e. modernization of agriculture, industry,

defense, and science and technology].79

The greater the continuity, the sharper the rhetoric of rupture. The Shanghai United

Front Department was ﬁerce in its criticism against the Gang of Four’s policy toward the national bourgeoisie. And yet, the report was nuanced and speciﬁc when it described the

Beijiao report and the subsequent efforts at reclassiﬁcation in Shanghai. Although the report would not frame it in such terms, the objective was clearly not to reverse the polices of the Cultural Revolution, but instead to implement them on a larger scale. Little had changed in how the problem of capitalist status was conceived: in the creation of public- private companies it had been common to treat any staff that had been involved in running the company as a capitalist, without differentiating between smaller owners and bona ﬁde capitalists.80 Under pressure to complete public-private mergers quickly and smoothly, so

79 SHMA: A33-6-13, 30 80 SHMA: A33-6-13, 20–21

209 as to avoid any unnecessary disruption of production, there had been little time to make

ﬁner distinctions, which would have had to involve careful examination of the employees’ past.81

Figure 5.1: Number of capitalists per province before and after differentiation

The December symposium was where the party set out its United Front policy for the “new era.” Months later, the Central United Front Department formally revoked the charges of a “surrenderist line” dating back to the early days of the Cultural Revolution and rehabilitated its former leadership.82 This formal act of exoneration gave the department full authority to handle the party’s connection with liminal but important groups in the country and among the diaspora as well as in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan.

At the same time, the Central United Front Department began collaborating with industrial ministries, national planning agencies, and the union on a plan to extend the reclas- siﬁcation of capitalists. Henceforth, this was called differentiation work. By late October

1979, the joint effort had resulted in a report on differentiation work co-signed by the United

Front Department and the party groups at the State Planning Commission, State Economic

81 Suzhou Municipal Archives (SZMA): A5-001-40, 7; and SHMA: A33-6-13, 20-22 82 MLD: 4924

210 Commission, Ministry of Commerce, Ministry of Light Industry, and the All-China Federa- tion of Trade Unions as well as one regulation in six points issued in the name of the Central

United Front Department, Organization Department together with the party groups at the

State Economic Commission, State Labor Bureau, and the Federation of Trade Unions. The

Party Center approved and transmitted the Joint Report on November 12.83 Five weeks later, the central leadership approved the Six-Point Regulation with the motivation that differentiation work was consistent with the longterm interest of the working class as it would mobilize “former industrialists and merchants” and their children in the common project of socialist modernization and improve the country’s image abroad as well as in Hong Kong,

Macau, and Taiwan.84

Reclassification of capitalists in 1980 differed from earlier initiatives in scope and generosity, rather than standards and procedures. Differentiation Work would take place at each and every unit where a private firm had become part of a joint public-private enterprise or assimilated into a state enterprise. The work units would have to examine the class status of all private-side personnel, regardless if they were retired, on sick leave, or even dead. Class status, after all, did not only have an impact on life in the factory but also on social policy and the lives of spouses and children. For the same reason, Differentiation Work even included capitalists who were no longer living in China. The latter were reclassified in absentia and never received any formal notification that the state had reconsidered their identity.85

The Joint Report contained the only typology of capitalists and their related kinds ever to be approved by the Party Center (Table 5.1). At the ﬁrst level, it distinguished two types of entrepreneurs who did not qualify as members of the bourgeoisie: the Small Three (小

三 xiao san) and the small-scale proprietors (小业主 xiao yezhu). The former covered self- employed merchants, streetside peddlers, and self-employed artisans. The second referred either to owners of small ﬁrms with three employees or less (depending on sector) or to

83 MLD: 60 84 MLD: 61 85 SHMA: B98-3-78, 6

211 Table 5.1: Typology of non-capitalist proprietors

Type Employees Capital Position

Small Three (petty No regular employees Limited Own labor as principal merchant, streetside source of income peddler, artisan)

Small-scale proprietor Not applicable RMB 2000 or less No authority to make (shareholder) decisions on the ﬁrm’s operation, investment, or personnel

Small-scale proprietor Three or less Non-negligible Own labor as principal (sole owner) source of income Source: MLD 60 managers who owned shares worth 2000 yuan or less and had little say in how the company had been run (in the party’s jargon, they had not held any of the “three powers,” i.e. operational management, capital management, and administration of the appointment and removal of personnel as well as the distribution of rewards and punishment). The Joint

Report acknowledged that there was a difference between the Small Three and the small- scale proprietors in that the latter derived part of their income from company proﬁts, but the degree of exploitation was considered to be mild.

The Joint Report’s criteria mirrored those used in Shanghai and elsewhere and which had been featured in the report to the United Front Symposium in December 1978. Instead of introducing a new standard for differentiation work, the party leadership thus preferred to lend ex post facto legitimacy to earlier reclassiﬁcation.

The standards for differentiation work were authoritative and clear, but far from comprehensive. The Joint Report consisted of no more than a few pages of large-print text. The passage on criteria had only eight sentences (albeit quite long ones). When Ping Jiesan, the deputy director of the CCP Central United Front Department, instructed provincial ofﬁcials to carry out “according to the standards” the latter were left to ﬁgure out how to make the rudimentary taxonomy work in practice.86 Putting words on the way it dealt with the am-

86 SHMA: A33-6-13, 30

212 biguities of differentiation, the Shanghai Marketing Cooperative opted for the same stock

phrase that Wang Hongwen had used for his “dialectical” method of reclassiﬁcation in 1971:

it would simultaneously stick to the standards and take the concrete situation as the starting

point.87

5.6 The bureaucratic process of recognition

One problem with the capitalist class status was that it applied to a range of professions.

But the labor and assets necessary for a banker to maintain operations differed greatly from

those required by the manager of a teahouse. For the purposes of Differentiation Work,

the number of employees was the preferred measure of exploitation, but was all employ-

ment equally exploitative? Owners of hair saloons, restaurants, and bath houses tended to

have many employees but did this mean that they were capitalists even if they took part

in the labor and made meager proﬁts? Earlier tentatives to standardize capitalist status

had struggled with similar questions. When the Jianghai Shipping Company wondered in

1980 whether skippers, who might have invested a considerable amount in vessel and crew

but worked under harsh circumstances and rarely amassed any wealth, could be consid-

ered capitalists they echoed a question that ofﬁcials on the Chongming island outside of

Shanghai had concerned themselves with in 1962.88 Recall also the ofﬁcials of the City God

Temple market and their opinion that merchants were more exploitative than craftsmen

because “standing behind a counter” was something all together different from “pulling a

saw.” The Joint Report was the ﬁrst document from the Party Center to acknowledge the

issue and provide some ﬂexibility between sectors; it set separate standards for different

sectors: one employee for commerce; two for food, service, and transport; and three for

manufacturing.

In addressing an old problem of classiﬁcation, the planners of differentiation work cre-

87 SHMA: B102-3-117, 5-6 88 SZMA: A5-002-249, 53; the Chongming report cites a draft from the central government on how to distinguish between self-employed owners of boats, small-scale proprietors, and capitalists in this poorly regulated and still privately operated business, SHMA: B154-1-336, 20

213 ated a new one. For it was not quite as easy to separate the commercial sector from the one dealing with food, service, and transport as it may have seemed for those who had grown accustomed to viewing the economy through statistical categories and aggregate numbers.

For the ofﬁcials in Shanghai, the tripartite standard meant they had to determine what a capitalist’s “principal” activity had been before they could evaluate whether the person in question ﬁt the bill.89 “Within the commercial sector there are some units that are not purely commercial but have a service or handicraft character,” wrote the Shanghai Differentiation

Work Group in a draft opinion, adding that it remained unclear “which employee standard should be used for these.”90 The group concluded that there was an unacceptable level of ambiguity in many cases. If local ofﬁcials were left to their own devices the many different ideas of what determined a business’ “character” would introduce arbitrary discrepancies between work units. The only solution was to introduce a citywide standard for classifying economic venture. And so another schema in three parts was born, which recognized the following hybrids: commercial operations handling heavy merchandise that had to be transported to the customer (e.g. coal, hardware, and grain stores) counted as part of the service industry; repair shops, vendors of hot food, and alcohol vendors (but only if the wine was consumed in the store) belonged to the service sector; business that produced or reﬁned the merchandise themselves (e.g. vendors of noodles, tofu, clothing, soap, candy) could apply the comparatively generous standard intended for manufacturing.91

The closer to the ground, the more complex the matter of class identity appeared and the less adequate the Joint Report’s standard. At the level of the individual work unit, differentiation work sometimes mobilized both “dead” materials—personnel ﬁles, ﬁrst and foremost, but also tax records and the state registers of companies from the 1950s—and

“living” sources—that is, interviews with former colleagues, employees, or relatives—in the investigation of an assigned capitalist’s past. The Differentiation Work Team at the

Shanghai Marketing Cooperative used both types of sources in its evaluation of a fruit ven-

89 SHMA: B98-3-78, 8 90 SHMA: B76-5-65, 23 91 SHMA: B76-5-65, 23

214 dor named Wang.92 Looking through his ﬁles, the Differentiation Work Team found that

he had employed three people and been worth two hundred yuan before the transition to

socialism. Since Wang was in the commercial sector, the three employees meant he met

the criteria of his capitalist designation. But instead of stopping the investigation here, the

Differentiation Work Team moved on to interview witnesses with knowledge of Wang’s

professional background. It was only then that it became clear that the three “employees”

had actually been part-owners. Wang was reclassiﬁed.93

Surely, the thoroughness shown in the fruit vendor’s case was something out of the

ordinary. The cadres at the Shanghai Marketing Cooperative would not have chosen to de-

scribe this particular case in the report to their superiors if it had not put them in a favorable

light. In most cases, both time and manpower allotted for differentiation work was limited.

The team in charge of reclassiﬁcation at the Bureau for Handicraft Industry Administration would have been hard pressed to be so meticulous in carrying out its tasks seeing as it had

only three months to review the class status of 6,622 employees.94 In Shanghai, a large part

of differentiation work would have consisted of reviewing earlier decisions on reclassiﬁca-

tion. In other parts of the country, the magnitude of the task would have depended on the

extent to which they had implemented the Beijiao policy in previous years.

All classiﬁcation efforts involve a compromise between the pressure toward increas-

ingly ﬁne distinctions to account for all observations and the economy of producing action-

able knowledge within an acceptable time frame. The most ambitious human classiﬁcatory

projects of the twentieth century—such as social statistics or racial biology—combined the

power of the modern bureaucratic state and scientiﬁc specialization and were fueled by a

constant ﬂow of resources and educated professionals. With the notable exception of the

public security sector, the Chinese Communist Party never committed itself to class assign-

ment enough to make it a science and never invested even a fraction of what went into such

projects. In April 1980, the United Front Department called on provinces to wrap up reclas-

92 SHMA: B102-3-117, 6 93 SHMA: B102-3-117, 6 94 SHMA: B158-4-92, 7

215 siﬁcation by mid-year, less than one year after the beginning of the project marked by the

Joint Report. Once again, the party sacriﬁced accuracy for expediency.

From the point of expediency, the value of assets was the most convenient measure. Un- surprisingly, cadres in Suzhou, a city just west of Shanghai, preferred the relatively straightforward money measure over the employee measure, even though the Joint Report clearly stated that the former should only be used as a supplementary standard in case of doubt.95

In addition to being clear, the money measure had the advantage of being intuitive. One cadre reportedly defended an assessment based on assets rather than employees with a short rhyme: “capitalist, capitalist, if there’s a lot of capital it’s a [capital]-ist” (资本家，资本

家，资本大就是家 zibenjia, zibenjia, ziben da jiu shi jia).96 This made sense to the workers at the

Jianghuai Shipping Company who, when asked about their opinion of whether skippers were capitalists, had a hard time accepting that the number of employees should determine capitalist status: “the skippers had quite a large workload, low level of education, some of these people led lives that were even harsher than for us workers; one look is enough to tell you they don’t seem like capitalists.”97 The higher authorities were conscious of the limits of the project from the beginning. The Shanghai Differentiation Work Group conditioned its very ﬁrst instructions to local groups by telling the latter that they should focus on the positive effects that differentiation might bring and not become tangled up in matters of principle to the extent that they lost sight of this overarching goal.98

Although the language of differentiation work was for the most part dry and technical, the sections in which the reports conveyed the result of its successful implementation were full of emotion. Invariably, the reports contained the grateful testimonies of the reclassi-

ﬁed, who spoke of a “great burden” having been removed or even “a second Liberation.”99

One fruit seller accounted for his experience in the following terms: “In the past, due to

95 MLD: 62 96 SZMA: A5-002-249, 53 97 SZMA: A5-002-249, 55 98 SHMA: B98-3-78, 4 99 With only slight variations, the same vocabulary was used in reports from Shanghai and Suzhou, see. SHMA: B158-4-92, 8; SZMA: A5-002-249, 50

216 the interference and sabotage of the ’Gang of Four’s” extreme leftist way of thinking my

home was ransacked, the effect on the alley [where I live] was very bad, my children were

also affected [受株连 shou zhulian], and as for me I was discriminated against at the work

unit; it made it impossible for the family to achieve peace. By differentiating [me] at this

time, the party’s tradition of seeking truth from facts has returned. Our great party has

given me a second political life.“100 Of course, these vivid expressions were to a large stock

phrases and formalized declarations of expected gratitude that appeared with little vari-

ation across different reports. Irrespective of the underlying intent, the inclusion of such

statements in each and every report on differentiation work highlights the basic ﬁction on which the party’s policy ﬁxing rests: that its corrective measures are part of a purely techni-

cal operation to address illegitimate situations produced by a deviation from the party line.

Failure to participate in this ﬁction was also documented in the reports, but under headings

like”ideological problems” and “lack of understanding.” One and the same report noted in

appreciation how one reclassiﬁed capitalist expressed his resentment toward the Gang of

Four after having been targeted as a capitalist in the Cultural Revolution, but it cited as a

failure of understanding another former capitalist who considered that if his class identity

had been mistaken the years of self-transformation he had gone through amounted to an

injustice.101

Much like restitution and “policy ﬁxing” in general, reclassiﬁcation offered historical jus-

tice in technical trappings. In this respect, differentiation work went further than any earlier

reclassiﬁcation: the party scrapped the earlier practice of asking representatives from the

masses for their opinion on changes of class status and decoupled the assessment of class

status from evaluation of political conduct.102 And yet, the implementation of differentia-

tion work shows that the party was perfectly aware that a decision on reclassiﬁcation was

at the same time an act of recognition of past wrongdoing. That is why Ping Jiesan, the vice-

director of the Central United Front Department, told the provincial ofﬁcials gathered for

100 SHMA: B102-3-117, 6 101 SHMA: B102-3-117, 2, 4 102 SHMA: B98-3-78, 8

217 a meeting on differentiation work in Beijing not to spend too much time separating small merchants from streetside peddlers and so on; what mattered was to determine capitalist status.103 The former distinction was indeed a technical point, but the latter determined position within the system of class status.

5.7 A quick ﬁx to a lingering problem

Today, differentiation work is largely a forgotten affair.104 Even as the reclassiﬁcation was under way, mentions in the press were a rare exception.105 The resolution on party history— adopted by the CCP Central Committee in June 1981— referred to differentiation work in a short paragraph on the class-related problems left over since the founding of the People’s

Republic:

As the entire nation reviewed and reversed large numbers of unjust, false, and

mistaken cases, cases in which [people] had been wrongfully designated as

rightists were corrected. Announcements were made to the effect that former

industrialists and merchants had already remolded themselves to become

toilers; small merchants, streetside peddlers, and self-employed artisans, who

were toilers to begin with, were differentiated from the former bourgeois indus-

trialists and merchants; the status of the vast majority of former landlords and

rich peasants, who have remolded themselves into toilers, has been changed.

This string of measures has appropriately resolved many of the contradictions

inside the party and among the people.106

103 SHMA: A33-6-13, 30 104 To my knowledge, there is not a single study of the topic. It is mentioned in passing in Xie, Gaige yu gaizao, 399-400; and just as brieﬂy in Yin and Song, “Luoshi dang dui minzu zichanjieji zhengce.” 105 Only two People’s Daily articles—one on United Front work and the other on the reversals of unjust, false, and mistaken verdicts—even mention differentiation work, “Zhonggong zhongyang tongzhanbu zai Jing zhaokaix- ing zuotanhui chongshen dang dui minzu zichanjieji de yiguan zhengce” 中共中央统战部在京召开大型座谈会重申党对民族资产阶级的一贯政策 (The CCP Central United Front Department holds a large symposium in Beijing to reiterate the party’s consistent policy toward the national bourgeoisie) on January 26, 1979; and “Pingfan yuan jia cuo an” 平反冤假错案 (Reverse unjust, false, and mistaken cases) on July 21, 1981 106 Translated from Zhongghong zhongyang weiyuanhui, “Lishi jueyi.” Compare with the English version published in Beijing Review no. 27 (1981), 10–39.

218 The 1981 resolution aptly presented the reversal of unjust verdicts and reclassiﬁcation

in the same category of righting historical wrongs. One was a highly publicized affair, the

other passed by almost unnoticed.

To understand why differentiation work passed without much notice, one needs to look

no further than the Six-Point Regulation of 1979. This document explained that even those who did not fulﬁll the requirements for reclassiﬁcation should no longer be considered cap-

italists. There was no sense, anymore, to separate those who had reformed themselves into

“toilers supporting themselves by their own work” and those who had not. The document

formalized the decision that “former merchants and industrialists” (原工商业者 yuan gong-

shangyezhe) had now collectively turned themselves into toilers. It was the end, by decree,

to the perpetual state of assimilation.

Differentiation work followed a monumental shift in Chinese society away from class as

a structuring principle. Shortly after the Third Plenum in December 1978, the Party Center

took the decision to remove the class labels of landlords and rich peasants.107 Hu Qiaomu, who as Mao’s secretary had helped draft the instructions for rural class assignment, was

tasked with giving this decision a Marxist explanation.108 Finding support in Lenin’s deﬁni-

tion of socialism as the eradication of all classes, he criticized the theory, which he attributed

to the Gang of Four but was in reality more Mao than anyone else, that class struggle would

remain a constant feature of socialism in a process referred to as permanent revolution.109

In June 1979, Hua Guofeng declared that the bourgeoisie no longer existed as a class in

China.110 But an announcement by the Communist Party’s Chairman was not enough to do

away with China’s one hundred and sixty thousand remaining capitalists. That is why the

Six-Point Regulation stipulated that persons with a capitalist class status would no longer

be referred to as “capitalist” or “bourgeois industrialist and merchant.” The correct term

107 MLD: 16 108 Notably, Hu Qiaomu was one of the writers of the 1948 document “Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu tudi gaige zhong ge shehui jieji de huafen ji qi daiyu de guiding” 中共中央关于土地改革中各社会阶级的划分及其待遇的规定 (CCP Center regulation on the division of various social classes and their treatment in the land reform) and undoubtedly closely involved in the drafting of the two 1950 documents on land reform and class assignment. 109 Quoted in Brown, “Moving Targets,” 73. 110 Hua, “Zhengfu gongzuo baogao.”

219 was “former industrialists and merchants.” Their class status would remain in the personnel ﬁles, but solely for the historical record. This historical identity would no longer have any bearing on social beneﬁts or political participation.

At Beijiao, the party had found a means to minimize the scope of class struggle by reducing the target population. Differentiation work, therefore, was little more than the nationwide implementation of this policy, coordinated by the new central leadership. But at the same time, the capitalist designation lost its function as an administrative-legal type and remained only as the name of a historical identity. This signiﬁed more than just a reduction of class antagonism; it was a way out of the revolution without having to negate the premise on which it had been fought. Class status was preserved in personnel ﬁles in the same way that the history of the revolution was recorded in party annals. Former capitalists were still marked by their past, just as the revolutionary heritage remained central to China’s national identity and to the Communist Party’s leadership. But as much as revolution was foundational in the intertwined genealogies of party, state, and nation, it was now a completed juncture.111 Class oppression and other injustices of the society against which the revolution had been fought no longer had any immediate bearing on the politics of the present. And so, the capitalist problem was solved. All it took was the end of the revolution.

111 Chevrier, “La Chine aujourd’hui: la nation sans la démocratie,” 276.

220 Conclusion

This dissertation started out by making a case for extending our analysis of Chinese social-

ism to cover the world of capitalists. The value of this interpretative move, it was proposed, was not primarily that it would help us understand what life was like for the capitalists— which would necessarily have led in the direction of a far more open-ended account of

multiple and incommensurable experiences—but that it might throw light on the process

that made capitalist difference into a persistent problem in the organization of industrial

society and the urban community. The preceding chapters have been an attempt to un-

derstand the socialist system by tracing the practices it adopted to deal with the capitalist

problem. The capitalist was fundamentally a political type since its very origins was an

attempt to describe society in such a way that it would become impossible not to change it.

While the type retained its political quality after the state takeover of private industry and

commerce as it became the object of the conﬂict and negotiation associated with the poli-

tics of historical dissociation, this study has emphasized the development of a bureaucratic

logic under socialism beyond the intentions of any actor or set of actors. To be sure, Chinese

leaders were fully capable of rationalizing their policy decisions in economic or ideological

terms. Rather than accepting such justiﬁcations at face value, this study has argued that a

self-reinforcing process of differentiation sustained the liminality of the capitalists in work-

place and polity. Finally, the external shock of the Cultural Revolution broke the trap of

liminality and in so doing opened for the move beyond class after Mao’s death. Now, one

hundred and sixty thousand people remained who were no longer capitalists in the formal

sense but who nevertheless carried the legacy of a bygone class.

221 An invitation to lunch

Having gained some measure of clarity with regards to the initial problem, a new question presents itself at the end of this study. Once the capitalist status, together with all the other class markers referring back to old society, had lost its political relevance, what became the place for the (by this point former) capitalists who remained? This question points in the direction of an investigation into the conditions that enabled the revolutionary party to leave the revolution behind while maintaining the institutions of power that it had put in place. To be sure, this question could serve to mark the beginning of a new project, but here it will help make the point that the process of differentiation that established the capitalist problem only came to a close once a new one began. The Democratic History Museum—a grey brick building in the central district of Chongqing, built on the grounds of a residence where the Communist leaders stationed in what was then the wartime capital would meet with wealthy industrialists and members of the educated elite—provide an ideal setting for this concluding reﬂection on how, once more, present was made distinct from past.

Here, among the many relics and displays narrating the history of the United Front from its origins to present day, we ﬁnd an arrangement of six wax statues, positioned around a table on which are placed all the ingredients and utensils needed for a hot pot (Figure 6.1).

In the center, standing, is Deng Xiaoping, the man who became the undisputed leader of the Communist Party after 1978. Around him, sitting, are ﬁve prominent industrialists and top-ranking members of the Two Associations: Hu Juewen, Hu Ziang, Gu Gengyu, Zhou

Shutao, and Rong Yiren. This life-sized diorama recreates an event-turned-myth: a lunch in the Great Hall of the People on January 17, 1979 to which Deng invited this small group of former capitalists to solicit their support on opening China to the world or, more to the point, make China attractive to overseas investors.1

The Third Plenum of the CCP Eleventh Central Committee, which concluded a few weeks before the hot pot lunch, had seen the party double down on a policy of socialist

1 Leng and Wang, Deng Xiaoping nianpu, 471.

222 Figure 6.1: Wax recreation of Deng Xiaoping’s lunch with Hu Juewen, Hu Ziang, Rong Yiren, Gu Gengyu, and Zhou Shutao

223 modernization. The project of modernization, ﬁrst envisioned by Premier Zhou Enlai in the last year of his life, required investment and technology from abroad. With this objective in mind, Deng invited the ﬁve representatives of the bourgeoisie to the Great Hall of the Peo- ple. “We should allow former [industrialists and merchants] to play a role,” he explained,

“using those who are well-trained and appointing capable individuals as cadres.”2 In line with recent recommendations from the United Front, the result of months of preparatory work leading up to the Third Plenum, he not only assured his guests that the party would take further steps to “ﬁx policy” but added that it made no sense to continue to label this group “capitalists” since its members no longer exploited others and no longer received

ﬁxed-rate dividends. In an accident of history, Deng came to preside over the end of the bourgeoisie that he had predicted over twenty years earlier at the Eighth Party Congress.

Deng and his party continued to ﬁnd use for the old capitalists even when—especially when—their class had ceased to exist. Over the lunch, he turned directly to Rong Yiren to give his guarantee that economic principles, not political ones, should be the basis for management. That is, Rong would be free to sign only those contracts that would bring about proﬁt and foreign exchange and he would be able to do so without administrative interference. He would have “full powers” including “the power to employ personnel.”3

Shortly after the meeting at the Great Hall of the People, Rong Yiren was made chairman of the board of directors and president of the newly founded China International Trust Invest- ment Corporation (CITIC) and in this capacity acted as consultant for the State Import and

Export Administration Commission and State Foreign Investment Administration Commis- sion set up in the summer of the same year. Under Rong’s leadership, the state-owned investment company—with the mission to attract foreign capital, introduce advanced technologies as well as the latest in operational and managerial technique—grew to become

China’s largest transnational conglomerate with forty-four subsidiaries and a broad portfo-

2 The ofﬁcial translation of Deng’s talk gives “capitalist industrialists and businessmen” for the Chinese 工商业者 gongshangyezhe, see Deng “We Should Make Use of Foreign Funds”; compare MLD: 4922. The added class marker of the English version underlines the fact that, in the Chinese Communist Party’s usage, the words gongshangyezhe (industrialists and merchants), zibenjia (capitalists), and minzu zichanjieji (national bourgeoisie) shared one and the same referent. 3 Deng, “We Should Make Use of Foreign Funds.”

224 lio of investments in ﬁnance, industry, and the service sector.4 No longer a capitalist, Rong

regained the authority that he had been deprived, as a capitalist, following the transition to

socialism.

When Rong died in 2005, obituaries in the party press revealed for the ﬁrst time that he

had been a secret member of the Communist Party for twenty years.5 As one of a select few

among China’s top industrialists, Rong had been given a government position following

socialist transition, serving ﬁrst as vice mayor in Shanghai and between 1959 and 1966 as vice minister for the textile industry. But it was the change of his class status from capitalist

to cadre, as per the 1979 Six-Point Regulation, that made it possible for him to join the

Communist Party.

At this point, class status had become an artifact of a revolutionary movement that had

run its course. Class lost its signiﬁcance as a principle that could determine one’s place within the organization of the workplace, the commune, or the polity. It was no longer the

measure by which to evaluate whether the socialist organization was just—which is to say,

true to the goal of “expropriating the expropriators,” as Marx liked to put it, and limiting

the inﬂuence of the dispossessed classes over China’s new direction—nor a meaningful

indicator of threats to national security. On January 11, 1979, eleven months before the Six-

Point Regulation formalized the decision that capitalist was no longer a class status, the

Party Center issued a decision to change the designations of landlords and rich peasants.6

In recognition of the fact that all but a tiny number of class enemies had, much like the

capitalists, reformed themselves to become members of the people, the policy called for a

general change of landlords’ and rich peasants’ class status to commune members.

In the 1980s, the administrative purges and background checks for party and state of-

ﬁcials no longer focused on prerevolutionary class identity or afﬁliation with reactionary

groups but aimed instead to weed out cadres who had risen through the ranks through

their participation in the struggles of the Cultural Revolution or had shown an extraordi-

4 Köll, “The Rong Family,” 10. 5 “Rong Yiren shoumi 20 nian.” 6 MLD: 16

225 nary propensity for violence.7 The Cultural Revolution had displaced Old Society as the main referent of historical injustice.

Only after prerevolutionary identity had become a bureaucratic matter with little to no political relevance were steps taken to make it more legible. In 1984, the China National In- stitute of Standardization made a minimal effort to standardize and extend the bare-bones taxonomy of class that had remained unchanged for thirty-four years. The institute passed two identical lists of sixty-two class designations, each with its own numerical code: GB/T

4764-1984 individual class status and and GB/T 4765-1984 for family class background.8

These were not government regulations but procedural standards intended to rationalize the processing of data collected in statistical tabulations, public security records, and personnel ﬁles that remained from the Mao era. As purely descriptive standards, they contained only a list of class designations and no criteria for assignment. The institute’s attempt at creating national transparency came not in the thirty years during which the state was concerned with identifying class identity and ascribing class status but at a point when bureaucrats sought only to relay, in a standardized fashion, information about class status. To put it simply, the question was no longer who had been a capitalist or a landlord in Old Society but who had been classiﬁed as such in the New China of the past.

If all states ﬁnd an illegible society to be a hindrance to effective intervention, the high- modernist state in particular aspires, at least according to James Scott, to create a society that

“eliminates local monopolies of information and creates a kind of national transparency through the uniformity of codes, identities, statistics, regulations, and measures.”9 This was not, as has been pointed out repeatedly throughout the text, how the class status system worked nor was it ever how the class status system was intended to work. This last distinction is important since historical scholarship on the Mao era has tried to move beyond the defunct theory of totalitarianism by empirical means—by amassing evidence of agency

7 In December 1982, the Party Center called for a purge of the Three Types of People from positions of power; a term used to refer to followers of the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing cliques, those who exhibited a “serious factionalist mentality,” and the perpetrators of violence and vandalism, see MLD: 79 8 Both appear in the National Public Service Platform for Standards Information, http://std.samr.gov.cn/ 9 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 78.

226 at the grassroots and local variation—but in so doing it has opened up to an interpretation

of difference as a failure of the state or even as a form of everyday resistance. As a conse-

quence, the attempt to bury once and for all the analytical framework of totalitarianism has

ended up saving it in a greatly diminished form, namely the political elite’s single-minded

and delusional pursuit of order.

Present from past

“If we do not ﬁx policy, the san bao will not want to come.”10 The head of the Central United

Front Department, Yang Jingren, could hardly have been much clearer when explaining why the party should step up the ﬁxing of policy to the Communist ofﬁcials and represen-

tatives of the democratic parties that had gathered for a conference on the role of the United

Front in the Special Economic Zones and the newly designated Coastal Open Cities, which

included Shanghai among other important ports. The term san bao (三胞, “three [kinds

of] compatriots”) was the party’s collective designation for Taiwanese, Hongkongese, and

members of the Chinese diaspora. It is easy to forget, given the rise of China as a priv-

ileged destination for foreign investors in the 1990s, just how important investment from

the san bao was in the ﬁrst decade of opening, when the growth of foreign direct investments

remained comparatively modest.11 At a time when most outsiders were wondering why

they should risk investing in a country that lacked clearly deﬁned and enforceable property

rights, entrepreneurs from Hong Kong and Taiwan moved in to establish a dominance that

they have retained into the twenty-ﬁrst century.12 For Deng Xiaoping, investment coming

in from the san bao belonged in a category of its own: “the overwhelming majority of our

countrymen abroad are motivated by concern for the well-being of their socialist fatherland

and the desire to cooperate in its development, and this is quite unlike foreign investments

in the literal meaning of the word.”13 National attachments aside, there were other incen-

10 MLD: 4992 11 Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, 268. 12 Naughton, The Chinese Economy, 401–6. 13 Quoted in Pantsov and Levine, Deng Xiaoping, 367.

227 tives for the san bao to bring their business to the mainland. Over time, preferential arrangements appeared for san bao investors and they were often well positioned to move quickly in response to policy shifts and to negotiate attractive deals with local bureaucrats.14 The same development has deepened economic codependency to a point where the initial rationale for investment no longer determines behavior. But even in the earliest stages of economic reform the party gave the san bao priority in the ﬁxing of policy.

Yang was not addressing the fixing policies for san bao specifically but rather the necessity to return as soon as possible belongings confiscated and residences occupied in the

Cultural Revolution. Restitution was rendered complicated, he suggested, by “leftist” attitudes, on the one hand, and practical difﬁculties, on the other. The United Front Depart- ment had received instructions to wrap up the ﬁxing of policy within two-three years—an extremely positive timeline seeing that people have continued to advance their claims to restitution until today. Special priority should be given, Yang said, to the Special Economic

Zones and the Coastal Open Cities.15

ForYang, thequestionofwhatitmeantto chuli thepast, orratherwhyonewouldwantto do so, had a straightforward answer. Under his leadership, the United Front Department’s policy ﬁxing became subordinated to the requirements of capital accumulation. There was a strong element of continuity as the department kept its old mission to connect the Com- munist Party to groups at the boundaries of the political community. However, the relevant space was no longer that of state socialism but the nation state. The party’s interest in the former capitalists in the reform era was motivated not by their historical class identity, nor really the knowledge and skills that Xu Dixin and others had associated with this identity, but was mainly due to their networks in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas, which was the result, in part, of the way that the Communist Party’s takeover in 1949 had dispersed capitalist families into the world. Policy ﬁxing became, in this context, a mechanism for depoliticization. Contrary to popular belief, the driver of depoliticization was not anything

14 Naughton, The Chinese Economy, 414–6; Mengin, Fragments of an Unﬁnished War, 182–9. 15 MLD: 4992

228 that can be meaningfully identiﬁed as a policy of “neoliberalism,” but neither was it the

case that the party simply reestablished norms and institutions to their pre-1966 function.16

Instead, as China became just one nation among with developmental goals commensurable with those of its neighbors, the politics of engaging with the wrongs committed under the

Communist Party’s own rule came to sever the link between old class oppression and enti-

tlement and belonging in the present.

It is easy to point out the hypocrisy of those who spoke of reconciliation and righting

past wrongs while at the same time downplaying their own role in committing the injustices

through a two-pronged strategy that reduced the scope of criminal culpability to the Gang

of Four and its followers while expanding the scope of historical responsibility to the point

of abstraction. To be sure, the Cultural Revolution, reinvented by party historians after

Mao’s death as a coherent movement that had perverted the authentic tradition of Chinese

socialism, was a convenient ﬁction for the new leadership. Then, as Shanghai repositioned

itself as a city open to outside investors, professional historians began to shift attention away

from the dominant narrative framework of colonial subjugation to the city’s past richness—

in wealth but also in culture and experiences—and importance in the history of modern

China.17 The past had lost its force. Clearly, it was not the case that old injustices had

been forgotten through some state-sponsored amnesia. Rather, class oppression, colonial

subjugation, civil war, and the violence of the socialist state came together in a long history

of violence that had shaped China as a nation but which belonged ﬁrmly in the past.

16 Jourda, “Les usages postrévolutionnaires,” 8. 17 Yeh, Shanghai Splendor, 211–2.

229 Archival sources

State archives

This dissertation relies on documents accessed in the following state archives:

• BJMA: Beijing Municipal Archives

• HZMA: Hangzhou Municipal Archives

• SHMA: Shanghai Municipal Archives

• SZMA: Suzhou Municipal Archives

In the tables below, documents are ordered by the folder identiﬁcation numbers cited in the footnotes. The tables also contain titles of the cited documents and dates indicating when the documents were created and consulted. Exact page numbers are given in the footnotes.

Documents from the Suzhou Municipal Archives have been shared with me by Zhang

Man. Documents from the Shanghai Municipal Archives accessed in September 2013, which have since been reclassiﬁed, were seen by Daniel Leese.

Beijing Municipal Archives (BJMA)

Folder Doc Title Created Consulted

022-010-01292 1 国务院八办关于开会讨论公私合营企业私方人员保留过高工资的处理意见（稿）195801 201607 的通知及私方人员工资情况调查表

State Council Eighth Ofﬁce Notice on the Meeting to Discuss the Opinion for Handling Excessively High Retention Salaries among Private-Side Per- sonnel in Public-Private Joint Management Firms (Draft) and Table from a Survey of the Salary Situation among Private-Side Personnel

230 BJMA continued 002-020-00370 万里对资产阶级分子下方支农问题的报告及总理的批示 196012 201607 Wan Li’s Report on the Issue of Sending Down Bourgeois Elements to Support Agriculture and the Premier’s Instructions 126-001-00315 49 关于北郊木材厂实行资产阶级工商业者退休办法工作汇报 19620602 201607 Report on the Beijiao Timber Milll’s Work to Implement the Procedures for Old-Age Pensions for Bourgeois Industrialists and Merchants

Hangzhou Municipal Archives (HZMA)

Folder Doc Title Created Consulted

J004-004-041 3 对落实省委［1978］65 号和省计委［1978］470 号文件中一些问题的意见 19781206 201604 Opinion on a Few Issues Regarding the Implementation of the Provincial Committee Document No. 65 [1978] and the Provincial Planning Com- mission Document No. 470 [1978] J133-001-192 71 关于落实党对民族资产阶级和小资产阶级政策几个试点的综合发言 19720420 201604 Summarizing to Sum Up the Fixing the Party’s Policy toward the National Bourgeois and the Petty Bourgeoisie at a Few Pilot Sites J133-001-192 67 关于杭州市百货公司落实党对民族资产阶级和小资产阶级政策试点的报告 19710825 201604 Report on the Pilot Site at the Hangzhou Municipal Department Com- pany to Fix the Party’s Policy toward the National Bourgeoisie and the Petty Bourgeoisie J133-001-192 13 商向前同志讲对统战工作的认识 19720418 201604 Comrade Shang Xiangqian Speaking on the Understanding of United Front Work

Shanghai Municipal Archives (SHMA)

Folder Doc Title Created Consulted

A33-3-85 1 上海市资本家、小业主人数统计表 1975 201703 Statistical Table with Numbers of Capitalists and Small Proprietors in Shanghai

231 SHMA continued A33-4-100 13 上海市委革命委员会统战小组关于去北京参加中央统战部座谈有关资本家查抄财 19751012 201703 物、高薪、退休等政策问题的意见的请示报告

Shanghai Municipal Revolutionary Committee United Front Group Re- port Requesting Instructions on the Opinion Following Participation in the Central United Front Department Symposium on Capitalists’ Conﬁs- cated Belongings, High Salaries, Old-Age Pensions and Other Policy Is- sues A33-6-12 55 中共上海市委关于对上海民族资产阶级分子被查抄财物处理意见的请示报告 19770715 201603 CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee Report Requesting Instructions on the Opinion on the Handling of the Conﬁscated Belongings of Shanghai’s National Bourgeois Elements A33-6-13 20 关于上海区分资本家和小业主、独立劳动者成份问题的情况回报材料 197812 201603 Materials Reported Back on the Situation Regarding the Issue of Shanghai Distinguishing Capitalist from Small Proprietor and Independent Toiler Status A33-6-9 35 中共上海市委统一战线工作部关于报送《“四人帮”及其上海的余党破坏革命统 19780921 201603 一战线的反动言论和罪行汇编》的报告

CCP Shanghai Municipal Commitee United Front Work Department Re- port on the Submission of ”Collection of the Reactionary Views and Crim- inal Acts of the ’Gang of Four’ and Its Shanghai Remnant Clique Sabotag- ing the Revolutionary United Front” A33-6-9 四人帮及其上海的余党破坏统一战线 1978 201603 Sabotage of the United Front by the Gang of Four and Its Shanghai Rem- nant Clique A36-1-74 关于 1956 年干部审查工作情况报告 195702 201805 Situation Report on the 1956 Cadre Examination Work A43-1-110 中共上海市第一重工业委员会组织部关于审阅自传的通告 195601 201805 CCP Shanghai Municipal First Heavy Industry Committee Organiza- tional Department Notice on Examining Autobiographies A45-1-7 中共上海市委组织部关于转发中共中央华东局审查干部委员会关于“自传纲要”19541224 201805 的通知的通知

CCP Shanghai Municipal Commitee Organization Department Notice Re- garding the CCP Central East China Bureau Cadre Examination Commit- tee Notice Regarding the ”Autobiography Outline”

232 SHMA continued A62-2-17 174 中共上海市委精简小组办公室编印的《精简工作简报》1961 年第 8 期 196105 201904 The Downsizing Work Brief, no. 8, 1961, edited by the Ofﬁce of the CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee Downsizing Group A71-1-581 中共上海市委郊区工作委员会关于郊区划分阶级的几个实例 1951 201704 CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee Suburban District Work Committee on A Few Examples on the Division of Classes in the Suburban Districts A80-2-245 中共上海市委组织部关于延长处级以上干部自传的上送期限等问题的通知 19560201 201805 CCP Shanghai Muncipal Committee Organization Department Notice on the Extension of the Deadline for Submitting Cadre Autobiographies on the Ofﬁce Level and Above and Other Issues B1-1-1855 22 中国人民解放军上海市军事管制委员会物资供应处关于清理官僚资本及敌伪战犯 194907 201703 财产立功提奖及惩处办法的公告

Chinese People’s Liberation Army Shanghai Military Control Committee Supply Ofﬁce Communiqué Regarding the Procedures for Awards and Punishment in the Sorting of Bureaucrat-Capital and Enemy-Puppet-War Criminal Assets B1-9-228 74 关于本市查抄财物处理工作的情况 1980 201309 On the Situation of the Municipality’s Work to Handle Looted Belongings B102-3-117 1 上海市供销合作社区别工作领导小组关于把原工商业者中的劳动者区别出来的工 198007 201703 作情况报告

Shanghai Municipal Supply and Marketing Cooperative Differentiation Work Leading Group Situation Report on the Work to Differentiate Toilers among Industrialists and Merchants B108-2-26 46 中共上海市委组织部关于全市干部写自传的几个具体问题的补充通知 19551210 201805 CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee Organization Department Supple- mentary Notice on Some Concrete Issues Related to Cadres of the Whole Municipality Writing Autobiographies B123-2-1197 5 上海市人民委员会第五办公室商业改造工作组关于私营商业阶级划分的初步意见 195507 201805 Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress Fifth Ofﬁce Commercial Transfor- mation Work Group Preliminary Opinion on the Decision of Class in Pri- vate Commerce B123-2-435 1 关于填写党员、干部登记表和入党志愿书”本人成份”等问题的解释 19540114 201805

233 SHMA continued Explanation Regarding Filling Out ”Individual Class Status” on Party Member and Cadre Registration Form and Applications to Join the Party and Other Issues B123-3-57 上海市商业一局党委和统战部有关私方人员安排的请示报告和文件 1956 201805 Shanghai Municipal First Commercial Bureau Party Committee and United Front Department Report Requesting Instruction and Documents Regarding Arrangements for Private-Side Personnel B123-4-112 上海市第一商业局关于私方人员的安排意见 1959 201805 Shanghai Municipal First Commercial Bureau Opinion on Arrangements for Private-Side Personnel B123-8-1227 36 在落实党对民族资产阶级政策中清理行商阶级成分的情况——中共上海市药材公 19720414 201805 司委员会在落实党对民族资产阶级和资产阶级知识分子政策讲用大会上的发言

The Situation of Clearing Up the Class Status of Traveling Merchants in the Fixing of the Party’s Policy toward the National Bourgeoisie—The Speech of the CCP Shanghai Municipal Medicine Company Committee at the Fixing the Party’s Policy toward the National Bourgeoisie and Bour- geois Intellectuals Application Meeting B123-8-1227 1 上海市革命委员会统战小组关于上海轮胎二厂落实党对民族资产阶级政策的情况 19710827 201805 的通知

Shanghai Municipal Revolutionary Committee United Front Group No- tice on the Situation of Fixing the Party’s Policy toward the National Bour- geoisie at the Shanghai Second Tire Factory B134-3-198 上海市革会关于抄家物资处理及解冻银行存款的通知 196903 201309 Shanghai Municipal Revolutionary Committee Notice on the Handling of Looted Goods and Unfreezing Bank Deposits B158-4-92 7 上海市第二轻工业局关于局区别工作领导小组关于三小区别工作的总结 19800524 201703 Shanghai Municipal Second Light Industry Bureau Summary Regarding the Bureau Differentiation Work Leading Group on the Small Three Dif- ferentiation Work B170-3-801 56 上海市对外贸易局关于加速查抄字画、古玩等物资的移交和清理工作的补充报告 19801222 201603 Shanghai Municipal Foreign Trade Bureau Supplementary Report on Ac- celerating the Work to Hand Over and Sort Out Conﬁscated Calligra- phies, Antiques, and Other Goods

234 SHMA continued B170-3-801 76 中国工艺品进出口公司上海市分公司就市文管会对查抄字画、古玩等物资的清理 19801204 201603 情况所提意见的函提出我们的意见

China Handicraft Import-Export Company Shanghai Branch Gives Our Opinion on the Enclosed Opinion by the Municipal Cultural Relics Ad- ministration Commission on the Situation of Sorting Conﬁscated Calligra- phies and Antiques B172-3-5 15 上海市文物图书清理小组工作简报（第一号） 19670527 201603 Shanghai Municipal Group for Sorting Cultural Relics and Books Work Brief (First Issue) B173-1-336 54 郑兴泰汽车机件制造厂关于资本家的自传 19551129 201805 Zhengxingtai Automotive Parts Factory on Capitalist Autobiography B182-1-2 51-53 上海市人民政府工商局成立公告 19490915 201905 Shanghai Municipal Government Communiqué on the Establishment of the Industrial and Commercial Bureau B182-1-375 上海市工商行政管理局 1952 年与上海市财委对私营工商业的排队情况 1952 201805 Shanghai Municipal Industrial and Commercial Administration Bureau Ranking of Private Industry and Commerce with the Shanghai Municipal Financial Committee in 1952 B183-1-6 上海市钟表工业公司行业董事监察人员名单及私方人员情况简历表 195605 201805 Shanghai Municipal Clock and Watch Industry Company Sector List of Names of Board and Supervisory Personnel and Private Side Personnel Resumes B23-4-292 15 上海市人民委员会关于资产阶级工商业者代表性人物退休问题的补充通知 19640625 201603 Shanghai Municipal People’s Committee Supplementary Notice on the Issue of Old-Age Pensions for Representative Figures among Bourgeois Industrialists and Merchants B248-2-194 101 市外贸局革命委员会关于接收查抄物资要求解决仑位的报告 19690607 201603 Municipal Foreign Trade Bureau Revolutionary Committee Report on Re- questing a Storage Space Solution for the Reception of Conﬁscated Goods B76-5-65 上海市化学工业局关于做好区别“小商、小贩、小手工业者”善后工作的通知、198001 201703 情况反映

Shanghai Municipal Chemical Industry Bureau Notice and Reﬂections Re- garding Successfully Carrying out the Follow-Up Work of Differentiating Small Merchants, Small Peddlers and Small Handicraft Proprietors

235 SHMA continued B98-3-78 1 上海市区别工作领导小组关于贯彻执行中共中央 (1979)84 号文实行具体办法 19800116 Shanghai Municipal Differentiation Work Leading Group on Putting in Place Concrete Measures to Implement CCP Central Document No. 84 (1979) C47-2-32 60 黄炎培在中国民主建国会上海市分会报告会议上的讲话稿 195402 201805 Manuscript of Huang Yanpei’s Speech at the Report Meeting of the China Democratic National Construction Association Shanghai Branch C48-1-170 上海市工商业联合会关于上海资本家大、中户投资定股资料、民建、工商联两会 1956 201805 市执委定息、工资情况统计

Shanghai Municipal Federation of Industry and Commerce Materials Re- garding the Investments and Shares of Large and Mid-sized Shanghai Capitalists and Statistics on the Situation of Fixed-Rate Dividends and Salaries in the Municipal Executive Committees of the Minjian and the FIC C48-1-202 上海市工商业联合会填报的上海市工商业者登记表汇总统计表 1963 201805 Shanghai Municipal Federation of Industry and Commerce Collection of Statistical Tables from the Registration of Shanghai Industrialists and Mer- chants C48-2-1261 4 全国工商联华东工作组关于上海市若干商业资本家对定息问题的思想反映和改造 195512 201805 中的动态

All-China FIC East China Working Group on the Trends of Ideological Reﬂections on the Fixed-Rate Dividend and Transformation among Some Merchant-Capitalists in Shanghai C48-2-2324 80 上海市工商业联合会关于 1963 年底上海市共有工商业者人数的说明 1963 201805 Shanghai Municipal Federation of Industry and Commerce Explanation Regarding the Total Number of Industrialists and Merchants in Shanghai at the End of 1963 C48-2-2342 12 上海市工商业联合会关于全市私方人员经济、职业、年龄、文化程度、定息收入 1963 201805 支出及平均生活费等情况及上海市工商业联和会与中国民主建国会上海市委员会

执委基本情况统计表

236 SHMA continued Shanghai Municipal Federation of Industry and Commerce Statistical Ta- bles Regarding the Circumstances of Economy, Employment, Age, Ed- ucation, Fixed-Rate Dividend Income and Average Living Expenses of Private-Side Personnel in the Entire Municipality as well as the Basic Cir- cumstances of the Executive Committees of the Shanghai Federation of Industry and Commerce and the China Democratic National Construc- tion Association Shanghai Committee C48-2-2348 7 上海市工商界生活互助金管理委员会关于本市工商界生活互助金的问题解答（第 19570529 201805 三号）

Shanghai Industrialist and Merchant Livelihood Mutual Assistance Fund Administration Committee Questions and Answers Regarding the Munic- ipality’s Industrialist and Merchant Livelihood Mutual Assistance Fund C48-2-2348 1 中国民主建国会中央常务会、中华全国工商业联合会关于两会协助党和政府做好 19570325 201805 精简工作问题的座谈会

China Democratic National Construction Association Central Standing Committee and All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce Sympo- sium on the Two Associations Assisting Party and Government to Suc- cessfully Carry Out Downsizing Work C48-2-2432 10 上海市工商业联合会关于全市私方人员平均生活费统计表 1963 201805 Shanghai Municipal Federation of Industry and Commerce Statistical Ta- bles Regarding the Average Living Expenses of Private-Side Personnel C48-2-2482 中华全国工商业联合会关于进行资产阶级工商业者登记工作的通知 19621008 201805 All-china Federation of Industry and Commerce Notice on Carrying Out Registration Work of Bourgeois Industrialists and Merchants C48-2-2887 224 1959-1964 年补助情况对照表 19650227 201805 Tables Comparing the Assistance Situation, 1959-1964 C48-2-2887 176 上海市工商业联合会关于资产阶级工商业者中年老退休等“四种人”生活困难补 19631107 201805 助情况的报告

Shanghai Federation of Industry and Commerce Report on the Livelihood Difﬁculties Assistance Situation among the Elderly and Retirees and the Other ”Four Types of People” among Bourgeois Industrialists and Mer- chants C48-2-2887 30 上海市工商业联合会关于各生活互助金工作情报的简报 19611215 201805

237 SHMA continued Shanghai Federation of Industry and Commerce Brief with Information Regarding the Livelihood Mutual Assistance Fund Work C48-3-205 上海市工商联向全国工商联报送的关于工商业联合会的组织设置情况，工商业者 1983 201805 基本情况，机关办公室用房落实政策情况等统计表报

Statistical Report by the Shanghai Municipal FIC to the All-China FIC on the Federation of Industry and Commerce’s Organizational Situation, the Basic Conditions of Industrialists and Merchants, the Situation with Fix- ing Policy for the Use of Housing to Set Up Ofﬁces, etc. D2-0-757 4 论大资产阶级与中小资产阶级的区别 19480520 201509 On the Difference Between the Big Bourgeoisie and the Middle and Small Bourgeoise D2-0-760 15 区别资产阶级的大中小没有必要吗？ 19480715 201509 Is It Not Necessary to Distinguish Between the Bourgeoisie’s Big, Middle, and Small? Y9-1-14 官僚资本各工业单位 (上海调查资料工业篇之一) 194903 201703 Bureaucrat-Capital Industrial Units (Shanghai Investigation Materials, In- dustry Chapter I)

Suzhou Municipal Archives (HZMA)

Folder Doc Title Created Consulted

A5-001-39 33 关于建立原工商业者区别工作领导小组的通知 19791224 201601 Notice on Establishing a Former Industrialists and Merchants Differenti- ation Work Leading Small Group A5-002-249 50 江苏省关于把原工商业者中的劳动者区别出来问题的总结 19800925 201601 Jiangsu Province Summary Concerning the Question of Differentiating Toilers from among Former Industrialists and Merchants

Research collections

The following research collections and digital archives have been consulted:

238 • CUHK: Chinese University of Hong Kong (Universities Service Centre for China Stud-

ies )

• ECNU: East China Normal University (Center for Contemporary Documents and His-

torical Materials)

• MLC: Maoist Legacy Collection, Institute of Chinese Studies at the University of

Freiburg

• MLD: Maoist Legacy Database, https://www.maoistlegacy.de/

• Michael Schoenhals’ private collection, Lund

• The Chinese Cultural Revolution Database, https://ccrd.usc.cuhk.edu.hk/

The tables below list documents based on the identiﬁcation numbers cited in the footnotes.

The tables also contain titles of the relevant documents and dates indicating when the documents were created and consulted. When applicable, page numbers are given in the footnotes. No tables are provided below for the Universities Service Centre for China Stud- ies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Michael Schoenhals’ private collection, or the

Chinese Cultural Revolution Database. For citation of sources from these collections, the footnotes contain full titles and bibliographic information.

East China Normal University (ECNU)

Item ID Document title Created Consulted

As 0351-141-042 国务院第八办公室副主任许涤新同志在全国公私合营企业工资会议上的报告要点 19560807 201704 Main Points of State Council Eight Ofﬁce Vice-Director Comrade Xu Dixin’s Report at the National Conference on Salaries in Public-Private Joint Management Firms EN 0351-204-172 中共中央转发中央国家机关统战系统军官组织对在京部分统战对象被查抄财物的 19710207 201704 处理意见

CCP Center Transmission of the Military Control Organization of the Cen- tral State Organs United Front System’s Opinion on Handling Possessions Conﬁscated from United Front Targets in the Capital EN 0351-204-177 专政对象包括那些人 196402 201704 Those Included among the Objects of Dictatorship

239 Maoist Legacy Collection (MLC)

Item ID Document title Created Consulted

G3 政法手册 1952(?) 201803 G8 干部档案 1961-1994 201810 Cadre dossier G9 干部档案 1958-1990 201810 Cadre dossier G312 川沙县洋泾供销合作社革命委员会文革查抄材料 1966-1987 201812 Chuangsha County Yangjing Supply and Marketing Cooperative Revolu- tionary Committee Cultural Revolution Looting Materials G804 掀起工商界自我改造大跃进高潮 195803 201803 Setting Off a High Tide for the Great Leap Forward in Self-Transformation among Industrialists and Merchants G814 知识分子、工商业者、民主党派自我改造大跃进学习参考资料 195804 201803 Study and Reference Material for the Great Leap Forward in Self- Transformation among Intellectuals, Industrialists and Merchants, and Democratic Parties

Maoist Legacy Database (MLD)

Item ID Document title Created Consulted

16 中央关于地主、富农分子摘帽问题和地、富子女成份问题的决定 19790111 202005 Center Decision Regarding the Question of Removing the Labels of Land- 202005 lord and Rich Peasant Elements and the Question of the Status of the Chil- dren of Landlords and Rich Peasants 60 中共中央批转中共中央统战部等六部门关于把原工商业者中的劳动者区别出来问 19791112 201905 题的请示报告

CCP Center Comments on and Transmits a Report from Six Departments 201905 Including the CCP Central United Front Work Department with Request for Instructions on the Issue of Differentiating Laborers from Former In- dustrialists and Merchants 61 中共中央批转中共中央统战部等五部门关于对原工商业者的若干具体政策的规定 19791217 202005

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240 MLD continued

Item ID Document title Created Consulted

CCP Center Transmits the Five Departments Including the Central United Front Work Department Provisions on Some Concrete Policies on Former Industrialists and Merchants 62 中央统战部等六部门印发《关于把原工商业者中的劳动者区别出来的工作的若干 19800417 202005 具体政策问题的意见》的通知

Six Departments including the Central United Front Work Department Is- sues the Notice ”Opinions on Some Concrete Policy Issues Regarding the Work to Differentiate Toilers Among Former Industrialists and Merchants 66 中央办公厅转发《关于把原工商业者中的劳动者区别出来的工作总结报告》 19811103 201905 Center General Ofﬁce Transmits ”Summary Report on the Work to Differ- entiate Toilers Among Former Industrialists and Merchants” 67 中共中央办公厅、国务院办公厅转发中央统战部等五部门《关于处理六十年代初 19830725 202003 期原工商业者被精简下放农村问题的请示报告》

CCP Center General Ofﬁce, State Council General Ofﬁce Transmits the Five Departments Including the Central United Front Work Department ”Situation Report Concerning the Handling of the Issue of Former Indus- trialists and Merchants Sent Down to the Countryside During the Down- sizing in the 60s 79 中共中央关于清理领导班子中“三种人”问题的通知 19821230 202006 CCP Center Notice on the Issue of Clearing out ”Three Types of People” from the Leadership Ranks 662 中共中央批准中央十人小组关于反革命分子和其他坏分子的解释及处理的政策界 1956-03-10 201805 限的暂行规定

Central Ten-Person Small Group’s Temporary Regulations on Policy De- marcations to Explain and Handle Counterrevolutionary Elements and Other Bad Elements 878 中共中央批转的上海市委关于落实党对民族资产阶级政策的若干问题的请示报告 1978 201812 CCP Center Transmits the Shanghai Municipal Committee Situation Re- port on Some Questions Regarding the Fixing of the Party’s Policy toward the National Bourgeoisie 1023 国务院关于在精简工作中妥善安置资产阶级工商业者的若干具体规定 19620716 202003

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241 MLD continued

Item ID Document title Created Consulted

Some Concrete Provisions from the State Council as to the Appropriate Settling of Bourgeois Industrialists and Merchants During Downsizing Work 1134 中共中央关于为潘汉年同志平反昭雪、恢复名誉的通知（节录） 19820823 201805 CCP Center Notice on the Posthumous Rehabilitation of Pan Hannian and the Restoration of His Name (Excerpt) 1362 中央关于审查干部的决定 195311 201810 Center Decision on Cadre Examination 1397 中央批转中央组织部关于全国审查干部工作会议情况的报告（节录） 19571223 201810 Center Transmits CCP Organizational Department Report on the Situa- tion at the National Cadre Examination Work Conference (Excerpt) 1416 政务院关于划分农村阶级成份的决定 19500804 201810 Government Administration Council Decision on the Division of Rural Class Status 1666 中共中央组织部《干部档案工作条例》 19800416 201810 CCP Central Organization Department ”Cadre Dossier Work Regula- tions” 1670 中共中央、国务院关于确保机要文件和档案材料安全的几项规定 19670217 201905 Several Provisions from the CCP Center and State Council on Keeping Conﬁdential Documents and Archival Materials Safe 1675 关于查阅中央管理干部的档案的规定 19671222 201905 Rules for the Consultation of Centrally Managed Cadre Dossiers 1694 填写干部登记表时如何填家庭出身和本人成份？ 1983 201810 How to Fill in Family Background and Individual Status When Filling in Cadre Registration Forms 1757 上海采访记录 201603 201812 Shanghai Interview Transcription 1928 第一审判庭开庭审问江青（十二月五日上午） 19801205 201812 The First Tribunal Session to Interrogate Jiang Qing (Morning, December 5) 2079 中共中央关于北京市北郊木材厂认真落实党对民族资产阶级和小资产阶级的各项 19690508 201905 政策

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242 MLD continued

Item ID Document title Created Consulted

CCP Center Notice on the Beijing Municipality Beijiao Timber Mill’s Con- scientious Fixing of the Party’s Policies Toward the National Bourgeoisie and the Petty Bourgeoisie 2092 关于在无产阶级文化大革命中加强公安工作的若干规定 19670113 201812 Several Rules Concerning the Strengthening of Public Security Work Dur- ing the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 2176 中共中央关于在文化大革命运动中处理红卫兵抄家物资的几项规定 19670320 201812 Some Provisions of the CCP Center Regarding the Handling of Goods Looted by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution Movement 2177 国务院批转中侨委关于处理侨户被查抄财物的请示 19680216 201812 State Council Transmits the Central Overseas Chinese Affairs Committee Request for Instructions Regarding the Handling of Property Seized from the Homes of Overseas Chinese 2179 中共中央转发统战军管组对在京部份统战对象被查抄财物的处理意见 19710207 201812 CCP Center Transmits the Military Control Group Opinion on Handling Possessions Conﬁscated from United Front Targets in Beijing 2185 中共中央关于在无产阶级文化大革命中保护文物图书的几点意见 19670514 201812 Several Opinions of the CCP Center Regarding Protecting Cultural Relics and Books During the Cultural Revolution 2437 国务院批转宗教事务局、国家建委等单位关于落实宗教团体房产政策等问题的报 19800716 201812 告

State Council Transmits the Religous Affairs Bureau, State Council Con- struction Committee and Other Units Report on Fixing Policies Related to the Real Estate of Religious Groups and Other Issues 2541 政务院关于没收战犯、汉奸、官僚资本家及反革命分子财产的指示 19510204 201805 Goverment Administration Council Directive on Conﬁscating the Prop- erty of War Criminals, Collaborators, Bureaucrat-Capitalists, and Coun- terrevolutionaries 2586 中共中央转发“关于加强信访工作和维护首都治安的报告”的批示 19721222 201905 CCP Center Directive Transmitting ”Report on Strenghtening Petitioning Work and Upholding Public Order in the Capital” 4922 搞建设要利用外资和发挥原工商业者的作用 19790117 202005

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To Construct We Should Make Use of Foreign Funds and Develop the 202005 Role of Former Capitalist Industrialists and Merchants 4924 中共中央统战部关于建议为全国统战、民族、宗教工作部门摘掉“执行投降主义 19790203 201905 路线”帽子的请示报告

CCP Central United Front Work Department Situation Report Concern- ing the Proposition to Remove the Label of ”Carrying Out a Surrenderist Line” From Departments of United Front, Ethnic, and Religious Work All Over the Country 4959 官僚买办资本家高渤海变为普通劳动者 195607 201805 Bureaucrat-capitalist Gao Bohai Becoming an Ordinary Toiler 5545 彭真反革命罪恶史 196708 202006 History of Peng Zhen’s Counterrevolutionary Crimes 5546 五月二十三日市区抄家财物处理工作会议纪要 19670523 202006 Minutes from the May 23 Muncipal and District Meeting on the Handling of Looted Goods 5547 上海市革命委员会文件 19670713 202006 Shanghai Revolutionary Commitee Document 5548 关于抄家财物处理工作中若干问题的意见（一） 19670712 202006 Opinions With Regards to Some Issues in the Handling of Looted Goods 5549 上海市抄家财物商业收购小组关于红卫兵抄家财物收购处理办法（草稿） 19670522 202006 Shanghai Municipal Looted Goods Commercial Acquisition Group Pro- cedures on Handling the Acquisition of Goods Looted by Red Guards 5550 关于红卫兵抄家金银财物上交的处理办法（草案） 19670522 202006 Procedures on Handling Looted Gold and Silver Handed Over by Red Guards 5551 中共中央、国务院、中央军委、中央文革关于进一步实行节约闹革命、坚决节约 19680218 202006 开支的紧急通知

CCP Center, State Council, Central Military Commission, Central Cul- tural Revolution Group Urgent Notice on Furthering Frugality while Making Revolution and Persisting in Reducing Expenses 5552 关于在处理一批待处理对象的国外股票的事例的报导 19671005 202006

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Report with Typical Examples from the Handling of the Foreign Bonds of Targets Awaiting Handling 5553 上海市化学工业局革命委员会办公室转发抄家财物处理组《处理抄家物资是一场 19680418 202006 严肃的阶级斗争》的情况报告

Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Chemical Industry Revolutionary Com- mittee Ofﬁce Transmits the Group for Handling Looted Goods’ Situation Report “The Handling of Conﬁscated Goods is a Severe Class Struggle,” Shanghai’s Bureau for Chemical Industry 5554 关于处理查抄资产阶级分子财物的通知 19671215 202006 Notice on the Handling of Goods Looted from Bourgeois Elements 5555 王洪文关于落实党对民族资产阶级、知识分子和归国侨胞问题的讲话 19720219 202006 Wang Hongwen’s Speech on Fixing Policy toward the National Bour- geoisie, Intellectuals, and Compatriots Returning from Overseas 5556 五月廿八日会议上市财贸组负责人黄金海同志讲话 19720528 202006 Head of the Municipal Finance and Trade Group Comrade Huang Jinhai’s Speech at the May 28 Meeting

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3.1. Author’s collection.

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282 Appendix

283 A. Wages and labor insurance, Shanghai

Average monthly Average Wage Labor Labor insurance Year wage of monthly wage expenditure insurance as part of state-employed worker (adjusted) ( ’0000) (’0000) wage expenditure

1952 65.17 65.17 99471 12181 0.12 1953 69.36 65.56 118332 18935 0.16 1954 69.49 64.46 119289 21182 0.18 1955 66.79 61.11 111861 20072 0.18 1956 70.01 63.76 133423 22857 0.17 1957 71.55 64.69 148316 25519 0.17 1958 70.7 63.92 167474 26745 0.16 1959 67.8 61.14 179581 29920 0.17 1960 65.61 58.95 175523 31559 0.18 1961 66.52 56.85 172905 34620 0.20 1962 68.42 58.83 159416 30956 0.19 1963 69.99 64.09 160586 34199 0.21 1964 70.71 66.21 167813 33117 0.20 1965 69.58 64.79 172616 33819 0.20 1966 67.31 64.66 169933 34536 0.20 1967 67.24 64.04 174542 35268 0.20 1968 61.94 59.05 171762 36016 0.21 1969 62.21 59.08 184382 36780 0.20 1970 61.32 58.46 180282 37560 0.21 1971 61.5 58.63 183494 38356 0.21 1972 61.42 58.61 189394 39169 0.21 1973 60.73 57.84 192914 39999 0.21 1974 60.25 57.49 195273 40847 0.21 1975 58.27 55.55 200123 41737 0.21 1976 57.2 54.84 210123 46531 0.22 1977 56.05 53.59 211635 49797 0.24 1978 59.68 56.78 238192 57424 0.24 1979 67.68 63.79 276346 81664 0.30 1980 75.95 67.63 315156 94004 0.30 1981 75.84 66.58 324156 102061 0.31 Monthly wages adjusted using the ofﬁcial consumer price index with 1952 as the base year. Sources: Shanghai shi tongjiju. Shanghai tongji nianjian. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1983 (for wages and labor insurance); Shanghai shi tongjiju. Shanghai tongji nianjian. Zhongguo tongji chubanshe, 2004 (for consumer price index). B. Evolution of class designations, 1925–50

Descriptive Ascriptive

Mao (1925) Mao (1939) Ruijin Government (1933) CCP Center (1948) Government Administration Council (1950)

Types Subtypes Types Subtypes Types Types Types

Big bourgeoisie Bourgeoisie Big bourgeoisie Capitalist and bureaucrat-capitalist Artisanal capitalist

Middle bourgeoisie National bourgeoisie Merchant-capitalist or merchant

Reactionary capitalist

Landlord class Landlord Landlord Landlord

Bankrupt landlord

Landlord/rich peasant cum industrialist/merchant

Local despots

Enlightened gentlemen

Rich peasant Old-style rich peasant Rich peasant

New-style rich peasant Reactionary rich peasant

Petty bourgeoisie Well-off element Non-peasant petty bourgeoisie Intellectual Independent professional Independent professional

Self-sufﬁcient element Young student Small merchant/street vendor Small merchan/street vendor

Nonself-sufﬁcent element Small merchant Religious professional Religious professional

Artisans Student Intellectual

Independent professional Small artisan

Semiproletariat Semiowner peasant Peasant class Rich peasant Middle peasant Middle peasant Middle peasant

Sharecropper Middle peasant Well-to-do middle peasant

Poor peasant Poor peasant

Handicraftworker

Shop assistant

Street vendor

Poor peasant Poor peasant Poor peasant

Proletariat Industrial proletariat Proletariat Worker Worker Worker Worker

Agricultural proletariat Artisanal toiler Handicraftworker

Soldier and revolutionary soldier

Professional and revolutionary profes- Revolutionary martyr’s dependent sional

Lumpenproletariat Lumpenproletariat Lumpenproletariat Lumpenproletariat

Urban coolie Farm laborer

Mao Zedong. ” 中国社会” Zhongguo 各阶 shehui 级 ge 的 jieji de 分 fenxi 析 [Analysis of all the classes in Chinese society] (December 1925); Mao Zedong. “中国革命Zhongguo 和中 geming 国 he Zhongguo共产 gongchandang 党” [The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party] (December 1939); Ruijin Government ” 怎样分” Zenyang析农 fenxi 村 nongcun 阶 jieji 级 [How to Analyze Rural Classes] (1933); CCP Center ” 关于土地改革中各社会阶级的划分及其待遇的规定” Guanyu tudi gaige zhong ge shehui jieji de huafen ji qi daiyu de guiding [Regulation about the the distinction and treatment of each social class during land reform] (April 27, 1948); Government Administration Council, 关于划分农村阶级成份的决定Guanyu huafen nongcun jieji chengfen de jueding [Decision on the Division of Rural Class Status] (August 4, 1950)