The People’s Republic of China (PRC), founded in 1949, has been the longest lasting Communist state in the world.1 In its formative stage – the Mao era (1949–1976) – the country experienced decades of international isolation as well as political chaos, economic disasters, and cultural and social decay, causing tens of millions of premature deaths in peacetime and leading the economy to the edge of collapse. Yet not only did the regime survive, but, in the post-Mao era, the country became a global power so strong as to convince many observers that China and the United States are caught in what the political scientist Graham Allison called a Thucydides Trap, “a deadly pattern of structural stress that results when a rising power challenges a ruling one.”2 Despite the never-ending predications of the “coming collapse of China” and of China’s “peaceful evolution,” there is little sign that either will come to pass in the foreseeable future.
What has given the Chinese and their system the strength to endure decades of turmoil and catastrophe yet not merely survive but thrive? Answering this question requires a multidisciplinary examination of every layer and aspect of the Communist system and Chinese society. This study, unlike most other works that try to account for the strength and endurance of China’s Communist system, does not examine politics at the top level nor on a national scale, but instead explores the quotidian aspects of people’s lives during the Mao era in China’s largest and arguably most cosmopolitan city, Shanghai. A micro social history can be a powerful lens for perusing the real lives of people, and thus provide a human face for politics and society. And, as a Chinese metaphor puts it, by looking at one spot, the whole leopard may be inferred.
Few cities in the world have generated so many strikingly different images as Shanghai. Since the late nineteenth century, Shanghai, literally meaning “upper sea” for its location at the outlet of the Yangzi River to the Pacific, has been known as a preeminently Westernized city, a city “in China but not of it,” a city that was “another China.” Shanghai has been considered a key to understanding modern China and, in the eyes of most Chinese, a portal through which virtually everything foreign – which is to say, all things advanced, exciting, dangerous, and Western – flowed into the nation. In popular writings, Shanghai has been depicted as a city of foreigners, compradors, bankers, gangsters, coolies, and prostitutes. It was declared a sin city, an adventurer’s paradise, and a gigantic dye vat in which everyone was tinted the same color.3 A standard guidebook published during the heyday of the city in the 1930s describes Shanghai as a “city of amazing paradoxes and fantastic contrasts,” calling it “the beautiful, bawdy, and gaudy; [a] contradiction of manners and morals; a vast brilliantly-hued cycloramic panoramic mural of the best and the worst of Orient and Occident.”4 US journalist Edgar Snow (1905–1972) called it “the wickedest and most colorful city of the old Orient.”5 Such contradictory images also exist in the Communists’ descriptions of the city. For the Communists, Shanghai, the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was a city with a glorious revolutionary tradition and stood at the forefront of the party’s anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism mission. At the same time, it was a “parasitic” city, the bridgehead of imperialist aggression again China, and the headquarters of China’s domestic reactionaries.6
Shanghai’s Fall … or Liberation
In the middle of the night on May 24, 1949, a detachment of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) crept into Shanghai. Since there was a 9:00 p.m. curfew that day, which silenced “the city that never sleeps,” their arrival was unknown to most of the slumbering population. At dawn the next day, the troops occupied the city proper and two days later, the Communists officially declared the city “liberated.”
This was not the first time the city had experienced war and occupation. A century before, during the Opium War of 1840, Shanghai, then a prosperous port specializing in the cotton trade, was attacked and occupied by British troops, leaving the town, as an eyewitness described it, with “no pedestrians on the streets and no dogs barking.”7 Since then the city has been caught up in numerous wars, both domestic and international. In the early 1860s, the Taiping rebels attacked Shanghai three times and occupied the suburb of Xujiahui, just five miles west of the walled town at the center of the city. In the Republican Revolution of 1911, troops occupied the city’s Chinese districts and declared them independent of the imperial Qing dynasty. Shanghai was a battlefield in the 1924 war between the warlords of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Eight years later, Japan attacked and bombed Shanghai. During the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945, Japan occupied the Chinese portions of the city for four years before it moved to take the core of the city – the International Settlement and the French Concession – after the outbreak of the Pacific War. The Japanese occupation continued till the end of the war in 1945.8
This time, things were different. The occupation was part of a great regime change and marked the beginning of what was essentially a rural-based revolution that seized and reshaped China’s most industrialized and Westernized city. As the sociologist Martin King Whyte has pointed out, “China’s new leaders were not, of course, country bumpkins: Most had had considerable urban experience before they took to the hills in 1927. Still, the task of bending the cities to suit the programs of the new government appeared formidable.”9 The Communists were well aware of the challenges facing them, especially in Shanghai. The Communist leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976) worried that a military occupation of Shanghai would paralyze the city. Just two months before the battle for Shanghai, Mao expressed his hesitation to Ivan Kovalev (1901–1993), the CCP’s top Soviet advisor, saying it would be more difficult to govern Shanghai than to occupy it. In particular, Mao asked the Soviet Union to send experts to help with governing the city.10
The takeover of Shanghai turned out to be surprisingly uneventful. For two months before the Communist military attack, the PLA had troops stationed in Danyang, a town in Jiangsu about 130 miles north of Shanghai. The battle of Shanghai was fiercely fought, but mainly in the rural areas surrounding the city. To avoid “being caught like rats in a china shop,” as war in the city proper was described, the Communists adopted a strategy of luring the Nationalist army in Shanghai to fight on the outskirts of the city, and it worked. Meanwhile, the CCP’s subversive cells, which had actively operated underground for decades in the city, also played a crucial role. They managed to incite a number of defections of Nationalist military leaders, including an army corps commander who ordered his more than 10,000 troops stationed in the city to put down their weapons. The CCP’s strong underground network within various trade unions played a key role in preventing the Nationalists from implementing an intended scorched earth plan, leaving the city to fall into the Communists’ hands largely intact.
By the time the PLA reached the city proper after midnight of Tuesday, May 24, it was remarkably quiet. George Wang (1927–), a local resident who was at the time employed by the China Weekly Review, an American edited English-language newspaper published in Shanghai, recalled that while he was on his way to the office in the morning of May 25, “apart from the fighting along [Suzhou] creek, everything else downtown seemed perfectly normal. There were cars and trams on the streets; people were walking to work or back from the market as usual.… Everything looked the same as ever, even the policemen on the street.”11 Just two days earlier, the Nationalist government had organized a parade on Shanghai’s streets to celebrate its “victory” in defending the city. Although people were skeptical of the claim of victory, no one realized that it was completely ridiculous, nor that the fall of the city to the Communists was imminent, not to mention that it would be uneventful.
“Shanghai was the greatest colonial city the world has ever known,” historian Ian McLachlan melodramatically wrote, “but when it fell, nothing happened.”12 Mak Lai-heung, then a journalist in Shanghai, recalled that the radio was still broadcasting music after midnight on Tuesday, only it went on and on – apparently no one was at work in the studio. The music was Beethoven’s Ninth, and Mak literally hailed the day – and the historical event – amid that music:
By two there was nothing happening, so we switched it off and went to bed. The next morning I ventured out into the street and I saw the Liberation army men sleeping right there at the entrance to our lane. I went over and talked to one of them who was awake. I said “When did you get here?” He said “one o’clock in the morning.” We were still listening to the radio at that time and they were already outside. They made no noise at all (see Figure I.1).13
It was all over by Wednesday morning. Residents noted that by 9:00 a.m., “shopkeepers in the side streets were even taking down their shutters and opening up for business.”14 Robert Guillain (1908–1998), a French journalist who was in Shanghai at the time, sent a cable to Le Monde reporting what he saw:
Shanghai, 25 May.—This morning, I saw the Communist spearhead arrive at the heart of Shanghai along the Nanking Road and the Bund. At the foot of the giant buildings, small, khaki-clad, mud-spattered young men advanced methodically. They were moving in small groups, hugging the walls in the empty streets and jumping from one crossing to the next…. During their short periods of rest, these peasant-soldiers craned their necks to stare at the tops of the 15- or 20-storey buildings, an obviously unfamiliar sight to them.15
Soon thousands of Communist soldiers and cadres, mostly from rural Shandong and northern Jiangsu, were handed responsibility for running the city. Parades were organized on the major boulevards of the city, ceremonially announcing the birth of a new regime (Figure I.2). By the summer of 1949, not much seemed to have changed. Shanghai was still ablaze with neon lights and its major boulevards were still lined with luxury shops and nightclubs. Soldiers patrolling the streets downtown exclaimed, “Even the wind on Nanjing Road smells fragrant.”16 But thereafter changes came quickly. Just eight months after the takeover, an American who flew on a Nationalist air raid over the city proclaimed, “From a Chinese air force B-25 over this Communist held metropolis, it is plain that Shanghai is a dying city.”17 On the ground, the city crawled with rich conspirators who believed in the power of corruption and whispered to each other: “The Reds are arriving in Shanghai, but they will soon become black here.”18 According to private reports from the city, many Shanghainese were “still denouncing the existing Government in private while cooperating with it in public and hoping for deliverance by somebody else.”19
Figure I.1 Communist soldiers resting on the sidewalks of Shanghai after taking over the city during the night of May 25, 1949. The soldiers’ pillows are their bags of millet and each solider carries an enamel bowl for food and water. The PLA issued a “do not disturb the residents” order upon entering Shanghai, contributing to the military’s reputation as a genuine “people’s army.”
Figure I.2 Spectators at a government-organized Liberation parade on October 8, 1949, at Bubbling Well Road (West Nanjing Road) near the corner of Gordon Road (Jiangning Road). Unlike Communist propaganda that portrayed the audience as enthusiastic citizens welcoming liberators, most people in the city had little idea of what to expect in the new era. Anxiety, apprehension, and curiosity were the main chord of the day. Photo by Jin Shisheng (1910–2000).
But all those who thought Shanghai was dying, or that it would seduce the Communists, or that “deliverance” was just around the corner were soon to be disappointed. In fact, after Liberation (as the Communist takeover is commonly called in China), as one author put it, “Shanghai made the transition to life without John Bull and Uncle Sam quite smoothly.”20 Within just a few months, the Communists had established a well-run government and successfully crushed currency speculation and contained inflation, two huge problems that to a great extent led to the downfall of the previous regime. In less than three years, the new government had decisively eliminated the major social vices of prostitution, drug trafficking, and gambling. The city’s notoriously powerful gangs were pulverized (Figures I.3a and I.3b). Shanghai, the city where the CCP was secretly founded with just twelve delegates twenty-eight years earlier, was now firmly in the grip of the Communists.
(a) Left, Huang Jinrong (1868–1953), Shanghai’s most senior gangster boss, chose to stay in Shanghai after Liberation and submitted a confession to the authorities. Nicknamed “Pockmarked Jinrong,” Huang had been the chief detective in the French Concession and, as one of the leaders of the so-called Green Gang – the biggest in Shanghai – allegedly was in cahoots with Chiang Kai-shek. Huang’s confession, which was published in Shanghai’s Daily News and Wenhui Daily, on May 20, 1951, read in part, “to return the great kindness of the People’s Government, I will help the government in suppressing counterrevolutionaries.”
(b) Right, To show the public that Huang had totally capitulated to the new regime, he was handed a broom and, at the age of 83, he swept the street in front of the Great World amusement arcade and entertainment complex.
In the next three decades, the city, like the nation, was largely cut off from the rest of the world and became a major locus of Maoist politics and programs (Figures I.4a and I.4b). It bore the brunt of numerous political campaigns and finally became the breeding ground of the Gang of Four, the Maoist radical clique that was a mainstay of the disastrous Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Economically, the Communists vowed to transform Shanghai from a city of consumption to a city of production. Building on the city’s manufacturing foundation inherited from its colonial past, new industries, especially light industry, were developed. For decades after 1949, “made in Shanghai” meant quality and style, and consumer products from Shanghai were coveted by customers throughout the country.
(a) Left, Residents of two alleyways on Pingliang Road in northeastern Shanghai listen to a radio broadcast about China’s new Marriage Law, implemented on May 1, 1950. The law stipulated that men and women have equal rights, prohibited concubinage, and contained a host of other provisions to end the patriarchal practices of China’s “feudal” society.
(b) Right, Teaching revolutionary songs in a Shanghai alley, ca. 1952.
Figure I.4 Mao’s regime excelled in mass mobilization and propaganda.
However, under the socialist planned economy, the central government treated Shanghai as a cash cow. For more than three decades, the city contributed an astonishing one-sixth of the central government’s annual revenue, leaving little for the city’s own needs. By the end of the Mao era in 1976, Shanghai was a jam-packed metropolis of over ten million people. It has remained China’s largest and most industrialized city, but its urban infrastructure very much lagged behind: By the end of the 1970s, average residential housing space per capita was 4.5 square meters and average paved street space per capita was only 0.8 square meters.21
The State–Society Paradigm
China’s most capitalistic and cosmopolitan city was thus engulfed in the Maoist rural-based revolution and run by a zealous Communist administration. Two decades after the takeover, in the words of historian Anthony Kubek (1920–2003), the thriving metropolis known as “the New York of the Far East” was reduced “from the fourth largest port in the world and great international clearinghouse for trade and ideas, to a sullen Chinese provincial town under the iron heel of a Communist agrarian bureaucracy with little sympathy for urban peoples in general and none for those in Shanghai in particular.”22 Despite its Cold War tone, this assessment was largely correct. But a key question, even after another half a century has passed, remains: How did ordinary people cope with the extraordinary changes brought by the regime change and Mao’s continuous revolution thereafter? To what extent did the city’s old cosmopolitanism survive? Does Shanghai’s stunning resurgence as a global megacity today represent a complete break with the Maoist “dark ages” half a century ago or might it have its roots there? What does Shanghai’s experience tell us about the nature of Communist rule in China, and, despite its twists and turns, does any of that experience remain relevant today?
For decades, writings about the Mao era have mostly looked at the politics within the Communist Party, political campaigns, and their ramifications in society. Given the Communists’ one-party rule and limited information on a society that was largely closed at the time, this approach was appropriate and sensible. In recent years more scholars have started, with good reason, to treat the period as a historical subject and to view the Mao era from a bottom-up perspective. Chronologically speaking, inasmuch as the era ended with Mao’s death nearly half a century ago and epic changes have occurred since then, it is now truly a part of history. Practically speaking, the opening of various archives in China (though in many cases the opening is still partial), the possibility of conducting fieldwork at the local level, and the availability of unofficial materials (minjian ziliao) via unconventional channels, such as flea markets and private collections, have greatly diversified scholarly approaches to the era and contributed to a new trend of exploring Mao’s China from below.23 A more profound reason, however, has to do with philosophy: In attempting to know the history of a nation, the lives of the common people and the everyday rhythm of grassroots society are now seen as important as – if not more important than – elite politics.
The result is that research in the field has revealed a more complex and multidimensional picture of Mao’s China, exceeding what we knew just a decade or so ago. One area of particular concern has been the limits of the state versus society paradigm, an issue raised by Elizabeth Perry some twenty-five years ago.24 As has now been well documented, for most of the Mao era, a radical ideology based on the notion of class struggle reigned supreme in the party and dictated the course of the party’s policies.25 In the CCP’s post-Mao political language, there had been a persistent “left” deviation in the Mao era, which obstructed the party’s “correct line.”26 We now also know that the factionalism within the party was not limited to a struggle among the party’s top leaders, but involved all levels of the party-state apparatus.27 Sporadically, moderate party leaders were able to implement some relatively mild or pragmatic policies on the ground while legitimizing them with Mao’s own words. Simply put, the state itself had a split personality.
Society was also divided, and in fact in its dealings with the party’s politics it was more variegated than the party itself. First of all, the majority of the people were all too ready to take advantage of the divisions at the top and find nooks and crannies where they could, to one extent or another, think and act as they wished. Then, there was a considerable portion of the population who were eager to swim in the mainstream of Maoism in order to advance their own interests. Furthermore, there were people who wangled and finagled in order to get on in the system no matter what direction the wind blew. All these various responses were frequently entangled with the party’s own fractures and inconsistent policies that, like a pendulum, swung from one extreme to the other. Any view of Mao’s China that sees no more than simple dichotomies cannot help but be blind to the heterogeneity in society and to some of the most intriguing, revealing, and significant aspects of society in those years.
Building on this understanding, this book aims to provide a multidimensional portrait of daily life in Shanghai during the Mao era, with a “thick description” (to use anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s term) of how a wide array of people, including industrialists, intellectuals, students, factory workers, and what were generally called “petty urbanites” (xiao shimin, or “little urbanites”), denizens of the city’s crowded alleyway house (lilong) neighborhoods, actively coped with “high socialism” in the search of material well-being, social status, intellectual satisfaction, and aesthetic pleasure.28 This search was not always in compliance with the party’s dictates; quite the opposite, it often defied political orthodoxy, even if the defiance was mostly unintentional.
There were a number of the party’s proclaimed principles and their associated policies that facilitated the above-mentioned activism at a time of Maoist political oppression and material scarcity. Before perusing snapshots of how these policies were implemented on the ground and the contextual details of how people exploited the party’s policies for their own benefit, it is necessary to put into perspective the party’s principles and policies that helped make grassroots-level activism possible.
The United Front
One of the CCP’s long-standing strategies was the united front, based on the notion of uniting with one’s lesser adversaries to fight against the primary adversary. During the revolution, the Communists vigorously pursued the united-front strategy and Mao explicitly claimed that it, together with armed struggle and party building, was one of the “three principal magic weapons for defeating the enemy in the Chinese revolution.”29 Two major united fronts were formed in the Republican era (1911–1949): First, the coalition between the Nationalists and Communists during the Northern Expedition of 1926–1927 against the warlords, and second, the alliance of the two during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945. After the Communist victory, and especially after the “New Democracy” promised by the party was quickly replaced by a radical “socialist transformation” in the mid-1950s, the united front seemed to fade away, remaining relevant mostly in issues related to national unity such as those involving Taiwan, Tibet, religious groups, and ethnic minorities.30
By the time the Cultural Revolution exploded on the scene in 1966, it looked like, as the historian Lyman Van Slyke noted, “the united front may have become largely irrelevant to concrete problems within China. It may have become somewhat formalized and dogmatic at the theoretical level.”31 However, as we will see later in this book, the united front was very much still alive in the Mao era despite the Maoist “class and class struggle” rhetoric and fanaticism. It was not only formalized and dogmatized at the theoretical level – the most obvious emblem here was the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), established as a state apparatus at the central and local levels, with members from both the Communist Party and the eight other legally permitted but powerless political parties, to serve as an indispensable symbol of “people’s democracy” – but also functioned in such a way as to have real consequences for people’s lives.
The united front served to validate giving some Nationalist Party figures and capitalists, both avowed targets of the revolution, political status as “united front personages” (tongzhan duixiang). As such, they enjoyed high salaries, kept their garden homes, still employed servants, and indulged in luxuries. Their privileged lives were also used to impress foreign visitors and helped with the party’s broad united-front strategy overseas. Except for the most radical years between late 1966 and early 1972, when these policies were mostly suspended, the privileges and bourgeois comforts protected by the united front indicated that Mao’s “magic weapon” was alive and well.32
Thus, although condemned and politically disadvantaged, in day-to-day life the old rich in the city, former capitalists, Nationalist officials, and so-called higher intellectuals still lived life at a level significantly above that of the common people and, indeed, became the envy of party cadres themselves. At the time of the Communist victory, there was a proposal in the PLA, initiated by a general and supported by many cadres, that soldiers’ pay should be raised. It was argued that a capitalist’s meal consisted of five courses whereas a PLA soldier had only salt water plus some pickled cabbage, and that wouldn’t do. Mao firmly opposed the proposal, saying, “I have always been of the opinion that the army should live plainly and work hard and be a model.” The tough lifestyle of Communists, in Mao’s mind, was exemplary of the revolution: “They had five courses while we ate pickles. There was politics in these pickles, out of which models would emerge. The PLA won people’s hearts and minds precisely because of these pickles.”33 Mao reiterated the point numerous times after Liberation. And among the public there was an enduring apprehension that party cadres faced the danger of being felled by bourgeois “sugar-coated bullets,” that is, they would be corrupted by material comfort and lose the will to fight.34 With a certain irony, the united-front policy allowed its subjects precisely the comfortable lifestyle that was denied the party’s cadres and the general public.
The Intellectuals
In a broad sense, the united front extended to the nation’s educated elite, generally categorized as “intellectuals” (zhishifenzi).35 In a nation where the vast majority of the people were illiterate, a school education was a privilege, mostly limited to individuals from the urban middle class or above in the pre-1949 era. Those who were educated before Liberation were to varying degrees estranged by the self-proclaimed regime of workers and peasants. Although many intellectuals joined the Communist revolution during the years of foreign aggression and civil war out of patriotism and a sense that social injustice had to be righted, they were seen to bear the original sin of being “bourgeois intellectuals” and thus not entirely trustworthy. In Mao’s words, intellectuals, like “petty bourgeois,” are “fellow travelers” of the party and, as the revolution continues, at various points many of them will desert.36
On the other side, China had a long tradition of literati serving as bureaucrats and community leaders. In modern times, Chinese intellectuals played a similar role. They had a strong sense of public responsibility and civic obligation, especially in times of national crisis. Many intellectuals were unhappy with the Nationalist government and sympathetic to the Communist revolution. In the early 1950s, while they applauded the revolution that allowed the “Chinese people to stand up,” many hoped they could act as a loyal opposition under the socialist regime. This hope, or rather illusion, was soon crushed. After the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, it was abundantly clear that intellectuals not only were not to be allowed to act as critics, but also that the cost of their quest for intellectual autonomy was condemnation and persecution.37
Much has been said about the suppression of freedom of speech in Mao’s China, but perhaps no incident is more revealing than Mao’s remark on the writer Lu Xun on July 7, 1957, at an officially planned social gathering in Shanghai during the so-called Hundred Flowers Campaign.38 Thirty-six writers, composers, other cultural celebrities, and businesspeople as well as Shanghai’s top party bosses attended. In a seemingly relaxed and amicable atmosphere, Mao was asked a hypothetical question about what the fate of the writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) would have been if he was still alive. While everyone in the room shuddered at the question, Mao’s reply was brutally candid: If Lu Xun were still alive, he would “either be put in prison but still write his stuff or he would know that the general situation required him not to say a single word.”39 Huang Zongying (1925–), a movie actress who sat close to Mao, recalled that Mao uttered those words in a clear and forthright manner, but the statement was like “a big clap of thunder right in front of me.” As she was pregnant at the time, “I felt like the baby in my womb was going to jump out” (Figure I.5).40 Huang’s reaction was nothing unusual. In public, it was Mao who revered Lu Xun as a hero of extraordinary wisdom and courage, and raised Lu Xun to the status of a revolutionary saint, perhaps next only to Mao himself. Yet in this candid conversation, Mao revealed that he would have sent Lu Xun to prison if he had dared to speak out – the mendacity was too frightening, and Mao’s comment was never publicized.41
Figure I.5 Mao meeting with intellectuals and cultural figures, Shanghai, July 7, 1957. The photo was published on the front page of People’s Daily (July 9, 1957), with a caption reading, “Chairman Mao holds a meeting with representatives of Shanghai’s scientific, educational, literary, artistic and industrial and commercial circles on July 7 at Shanghai’s Sino-Soviet Friendship Building. The photograph shows Chairman Mao having intimate exchanges with them.” At the table behind that at which Mao sits are (extreme left, and partly obscured by Mao’s head) Huang Zongying and her husband, Zhao Dan (1915–1980), a famous movie actor. The man to Huang’s left wearing glasses is Zhang Chunqiao (1917–2005), then editor-in-chief of Liberation Daily, Shanghai’s CCP mouthpiece. Luo Ji’nan (1898–1971), who asked the sensitive question about Lu Xun, is facing Mao (front, back to the camera, second from the right, wearing glasses and with unkempt hair). According to Huang, the meeting was planned as a casual social event and the seating was random.
The Communist Party nevertheless needed the expertise and skills of professionals to carry out its project of socialist nation-building, especially in the fields of science and technology. Hence it developed what was referred as an intellectual policy, a set of vague dogmas that swung between labeling educated people “bourgeois intellectuals” who must undergo “thought reform” in order to be productive members of socialist society, and acknowledging them as among the working people who, by dint of their skill and knowledge, contributed to the cause of socialism. The pendulum, however, rested most of the time on the unfavorable side, as Mao insisted that the label “bourgeois intellectuals” remained valid even after years of thought reform.42 However, regardless of the tag, when it came to the actual implementation of policy, “to carry out the intellectual policy” (luoshi zhishifenzi zhengce) meant making sensible and often favorable concessions to the people so categorized in job assignments, promotions, salaries, housing allocations, and so on.43 In Mao’s words, “bourgeois intellectuals may be bought when necessary.”44
While intellectual life in general was straightjacketed by Maoist ideology and the party line, various fields in the humanities and social sciences were particularly hard hit. Political science, for instance, was seen as equivalent to the study of Marxism. The same applied to philosophy, and sociology as a discipline was totally eliminated.45 One odd exception was translated literature, which thrived. Under tight political control, translation, rather than original creative writing, seemed to be ideologically safer and politically less vulnerable. The translation of literature, especially European literature, experienced a boom.
Many Communist leaders in charge of cultural affairs were familiar with and fond of the European literature that had been introduced to China in their youth in the Republican era, and they tended to be supportive of translating foreign literature. Ideological kinship gave Russian and Soviet literature a birthright in socialist China. Marx and Engels’s favorable remarks on nineteenth-century European classics served as a license to publish a great variety of these works in China. As a result, translators of foreign literature enjoyed great popularity and prestige in the Mao era. Even during the Cultural Revolution, when books were burned and banned, reading among the youth was a “deep and silent undercurrent.”46 With the great increase of the literacy rate (especially in cities) and a huge amount of translated works published and available via numerous channels, Mao’s youth were among the best-read generation in foreign literature in recent Chinese history.
The Economy
Frequent political campaigns and purges in the Mao era placed economic development on the back burner. After the Great Leap Forward of 1958–1962,47 even the Soviet-style five-year economic plans were not necessarily put into effect.48 But there was always a degree of pragmatism within the party and a group of level-headed leaders remained devoted to economic matters and day-to-day governance. Mao overall “had a very poor grasp of economics,” as he himself would admit in a moment of frankness in early 1961 when famine was widespread.49 Still, his words on the economy were taken as supreme instructions. On several occasions in the war years, Mao pointed out the importance of finance and production for ensuring the victory of the revolution. This idea was summarized in the slogan “develop the economy and ensure supplies.” This became an essential strategy for safeguarding at least a modicum of rationality amid the fanatic “politics in command” (zhengzhi guashuai) of the Mao era.50 Even during the most radical years of the Cultural Revolution when the entire nation seemed to have succumbed to mass insanity, Mao gave his support – albeit lukewarm – to the economy in order to prevent it from collapsing and to maintain a level of basic social order. To that extent, pragmatism within the party never completely disappeared.
On September 7, 1966, just three months after Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, People’s Daily, with Mao’s approval, published an editorial titled “Grasp Revolution and Promote Production,” calling for linking revolution and production. A month later, the newspaper carried another editorial with virtually the same title, reemphasizing the theme.51 To put that theme into effect, an expanded CCP Political Bureau meeting in December adopted a resolution consisting of ten guidelines for economic production, including working hours, workplace discipline, and quality control.52 In the next decade, as everything had to be validated under the banner of “revolution,” the expression “Grasping Revolution and Promoting Production” in actuality meant the second half only, that is, putting the spurs to production. The slogan, together with “Develop the Economy and Ensure Supplies,” was printed on ration coupons and inscribed with Mao’s own calligraphy in wall decorations and window displays everywhere in the country (Figure I.6b). They were used to balance or, to some extent, counteract the radical theme of “politics in command” in those turbulent years, now officially pronounced to have been “a decade of great calamity.”
(a) Top, Beginning on September 26, 1968, the Xinghuo Food Store on the corner of Tibet Road and Xinzha Road in downtown Shanghai was open twenty-four hours a day, making it Shanghai’s – and indeed China’s – first twenty-four-hour convenience store. In addition to food, the store also stocked such common items as fuses, candles, matches, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and postage stamps, and provided services such as emergency phone calls and inflating bicycle tires. This made the Xinghuo a model of “serving the people.”
(b) Bottom, A poster titled Spring Winds on a Snowy Night (published in 1976), depicting fifty shoppers and shop assistants in a busy food store in the middle of a city, was said to be inspired by Xinghuo. The slogans on the wall read “Develop the Economy and Ensure Supplies” (top left) and “Criticize Bourgeois Rights Thinking and Serve the People Wholeheartedly!” (top center).
The emphasis on production and the economy meant job opportunities and material benefits for the people. Regardless of the proclaimed ideological purposes of Mao’s endless campaigns, everyday people were concerned about avoiding becoming a political target and, moreover, seeking what they called shihui, or “real benefits,” whenever possible. Karl Gerth has demonstrated how consumerism undermined Communism in the Mao era and prepared for the varieties of capitalism in post-Mao China, arguing that “regardless of the specific institutional arrangements, the CCP was always developing one or another variation of industrial capitalism.”53 Government programs that included real benefits for the people usually worked well. One of them was women’s liberation, a sociopolitical theme that the CCP had advocated since its nascent years in Yan’an (1935–1948). In the public mind, and to some extent in the party as well, women’s liberation consisted most of all in women’s participation in the workforce outside the home. Women’s employment increased remarkably in the Mao years. As we shall see, the Great Leap Forward, despite its failures, marked the beginning of women joining the workforce on a large scale and ultimately led to near universal employment of working-age women in urban China.
The party’s moderate policies such as the united front and developing the economy were frequently submerged by a flood of radical rhetoric of “class and class struggle” and “politics in command.” Nevertheless, such policies endured throughout the Mao era. The pragmatism amid fanaticism served as a justification for allocating resources to improving people’s lives and allowing a certain level of freedom in the pursuit of material and emotional comfort.
Researchers of Communism have noted the existence of a noncompliant “second society” in which “people offered no more than outward compliance, keeping their innermost thoughts and personal feeling to themselves” while managing “to keep a diversity of cultural traditions alive.”54 Maintaining one’s own way of life in terms of material comfort and intellectual pursuits was a way of defending the type of character and individuality that Maoist radicals deemed to be deviant and dissident. Tenaciously and ingenuously pursuing “bourgeois pleasure” in daily life – a subject of the following chapters – no matter how subconsciously it might have been exercised, was, to borrow James Scott’s term, a powerful “weapon of the weak.”55 Unlike Scott’s peasant troops, however, here the group that wielded the weapon consisted of urbanites who, in their battle against intrusion into their private lives, had quietly become what Michel de Certeau called “a dark rock that resists all assimilation.”56
The interaction between the party-state and society in the Mao era in a way resembled Chinese shadowboxing, tai chi, with its circuitousness, indirection, ingenuity, and accommodation of all parties involved. Part of such a haecceity is often thought to be stereotypically “Asian.” Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohammad once suggested so, and academics such as Samuel P. Huntington apparently agreed: “Asians generally pursue their goals with others in ways which are subtle, indirect, modulated, devious, nonjudgmental, nonmoralistic, and non-confrontational.”57 This is, of course, a broad generalization, but the deep cultural roots that led to such a character have to do with living under a variety of long-lasting hierarchical institutions with total power, of which China was no doubt a prominent case. Political tai chi, so to speak, represented an often invisible and instinctively roundabout resistance against a tyranny that, paradoxically, had its own pliability and elasticity. Under the circumstances, such interaction led to a degree of balance and composure in everyday life that sustained the regime as well as the operation of society. Ultimately, such a delicate balance paved the way for Shanghai’s resurgence as a cosmopolitan city in the post-Mao era. More importantly, on a much larger scale it led to the great resilience of Chinese society that has bought China to where it is today.
