Chapter 6 explores supernatural rumours as a form of supernatural politics, a means whereby the uneducated put their fears and concerns about the accession of the CCP to power into the public domain. The chapter focuses on two particular ‘epidemics’ of rumour, the first of which told how the Soviet government had asked Mao Zedong for the hearts, livers, eyes, testicles, and breasts of 20,000 Chinese people in order to make an atom bomb; the second of which occurred in the wake of the famine and told of a conversation that had been heard between two toads which predicted that the elderly would not survive unless the young baked them buns in the shape of toads. The chapter explores the meanings of both rumours, analyses their disseminators, evaluates the effectiveness of the CCP’s response, and asks how far they were acts of resistance.

The introduction outlines the main issues tackled in the volume and presents urban collectivization during the Great Leap Forward as a case study for the search of a socialist everyday, different from and alternative to the capitalist one. It highlights how this search embodied a specific understanding of the political economy, and how it highlighted contradictions within the Maoist project of revolution. Finally, it describes the sources and methodology adopted in the book.

Chapter 5 examines the demise of urban collectivization after 1961. While the production side of urban communes had its problems, it remained economically profitable; it was communal welfare services (canteens, childcare, etc.) that were deemed to be wasteful and dysfunctional and were eventually disbanded, and this could not but have disastrous consequences for female labor and the project of female liberation. Many workers, newly subjected to the double disciplining of industrial labor and family chores, protested these closures, and archival sources convey their dismay and their vocal criticism, which highlighted the continued devaluation of female workers and of their labor, both in the home and in the factory.

This chapter describes the initial phase of the urban commune campaign, in the second half of 1958, and it investigates both Party official rhetoric and archival sources from the early communes in Beijing to show how early models of collectivization were presented as “prescriptive descriptions” to be followed, but also how contradictions between the different goals of this mass movement surfaced almost immediately and framed the praxis of activists and workers at the street level.

By early 1959, faced with the famine taking hold of the countryside, the CCP leadership reined in the more radical aspects of the Great Leap. Yet, despite that, urban collectivization continued. This chapter explores urban experiments in Beijing between 1959 and 1960, when, in a moment of political uncertainty, workers, activists, and cadres in various neighborhoods strove to define the confines of what was possible. In particular, they tried to figure out what the promised transformation from “housewives” to (female) “workers” meant, both practically and politically, and what kind of activities should be considered under the category of “productive labor.” This search is set in a wider context by showing how it echoes the debates and discussions in Marxist feminism and social reproduction theory.

The urban and rural collectivization campaign of the Great Leap coincided with a nation-wide debate on the law of value, bourgeois right, and the socialist economy. This chapter demonstrates how what appeared to be an abstract discussion among economists, social scientists, and party theoreticians was in fact intimately connected with and relevant to the praxis of urban collectivization. This was neither the case of a theoretical position or an ideological argument at the top fueling a policy change at the bottom, nor that of a political experiment at the street level which needed to be justified and rearticulated at the level of Marxist theory. Rather, the two aspects – as it often is for Marxist politics – were interdependent, co-determined, and yet always in a state of profound tension. Understanding the Great Leap Forward requires insights into both theoretical abstraction and the world of quotidian praxis.

The Epilogue traces the legacy of urban collectivization in the rest of the Mao era and its reinterpretation after 1978.