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 cate- gory. While university students and labor activists had introduced the concept of the bour- geoisie in the early twentieth century to make sense of society’s industrial reorganization, the Chinese Communist Party’s expropriation of private industrial and commercial enter- prise 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 re- quired 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 collec- tions, 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 af- ter 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