China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed - Notes

China Under Mao

Rural Revolution

Major social revolutions typically create larger, stronger, and more centralized states.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) carried out this agenda with speed and thoroughness in its first decade.
In the countryside, this was completed in two stages:
- Revolutionary land reform: Compulsory staged class struggle destroyed the economic and political foundations of local elites.
- Collectivization: Land was consolidated into village-wide farms, and peasants became bonded laborers subject to party-state appointed leaders.

Land Reform as Class Struggle

The CCP's practice of land reform was conducted as class struggle.
The party aimed to change the rural social structure for greater equality and to promote the interests of the poor.
CCP authority had to be established by securing the region militarily.
Cadres orchestrated campaigns against class enemies and political opponents.
New village governments were established.
This extended state power directly into the grass roots.

Mao Zedong's Contribution

Mao's strategy of rural revolution was his signature contribution to Marxism-Leninism.
He advocated that China’s revolution would be a peasant revolution, contrary to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy.
From 1925 to 1927, Mao was the leading expert on rural issues.
Mao argued that China was ripe for rural revolution.
A thorough transformation of its backward rural social structure would create the necessary revolutionary energy to bring China’s national revolution to completion.
Mao analyzed the economic structure of villages in South China leading up to the July 1926 launch of the Northern Expedition.
He specified the exploitation suffered by the majority due to excessive rents, indebtedness, unequal access to land, and landlord domination of local militia.
Mao helped draft a resolution stating that China’s national revolution was a peasant revolution, as 80% of the population lived on farms.
The national revolution could not be consolidated without liberating peasants from economic and political oppression.
Mao wrote that the revolution could not succeed without peasant support, and that the landlord class was the greatest adversary of the national revolution.

Controversy and Conflict

Mao's view of the peasant movement as a class struggle became highly controversial in the Nationalist-Communist alliance.
The Revolutionary Army under Chiang Kai-shek often retained village militias controlled by landowners.
Mao advocated dissolving the local militias because they were controlled by landlords and would block rural revolution.
New farmers’ associations, created by CCP activists, could operate unopposed after local militias were disarmed.
Led by the dispossessed, the farmers’ associations conducted trials of “local bullies and evil gentry,” subjecting village elites to public humiliation, beatings, and summary executions, after which they distributed the property among themselves.
Soviet advisors were alarmed by the rural violence, which they felt threatened the Nationalist-Communist alliance.
Stalin ordered the CCP to moderate the movement, and its Central Committee tried to stop the violence.
Many corps commanders replaced Communist commissars with non-Communist ones and suppressed rural uprisings and reversed land seizures.

Mao's Response

Mao refuted the view that the peasant movement was deplorable, arguing that it promised a more unified alliance.
He argued that without the violent overthrow of the landlord class, there could be no real united front.
During the revolution, “all actions of the peasants against the feudal landlord class are correct. Even if there are some excesses, they are still correct, because unless they learn to go too far . . . they will certainly not be able to overthrow the power of the feudal class built up over several thousand years.”
Mao celebrated the anniversary of the Paris Commune, stating that “only class wars can liberate humanity.”
He argued that criticisms of “red terror” were part of a plot by imperialists to sow dissension among China’s revolutionary forces.
Mao wrote that “white terror” by the forces of order was always much worse.

Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan

Mao’s most detailed defense of the peasant revolution was the lengthy report he submitted in February 1927 to the Nationalist Party’s Central Committee on the peasant movement in Hunan.
The report describes a peasant rebellion against landlords and rich peasants that would become a template for subsequent communist land reform.
In particular, its description became the model for the “struggle sessions” through which CCP cadres later carried out land reform, and was later applied to party rule in urban China as well.
In this essay, Mao expressed views about violence as the crucible of revolution that remained at the core of his political philosophy until the end of his life.
The report praised the outburst of revolutionary violence as necessary, describing it in detail, and celebrating its liberating impact on the rural poor.
Mao argued that one’s attitude toward rural revolution was a test that determined whether you stood on the side of revolution or reaction.
He praised the peasant rebellion, stating that “The present upsurge of the peasant movement is a colossal event. In a very short time, several hundred million peasants in China’s central, southern, and northern provinces will rise like a fierce wind or tempest, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it."
Mao described the peasants’ actions with approval. “A big crowd is rallied to demonstrate against the house of a local bully or one of the bad gentry who is hostile to the association. The demonstrators eat at the offender’s house, slaughtering his pigs and consuming his grain as a matter of course.”
Public humiliation is an important part of the act of rebellion.
Parades through the villages in tall hats were common.
Mao refuted the idea that this was excessive, arguing that the peasants keep clear accounts, and very seldom has the punishment exceeded the crime.
Mao argued that a revolution is an uprising, an act of violence whereby one class overthrows the power of another.
"If the peasants do not use extremely great force, they cannot possibly overthrow the deeply rooted power of the landlords, which has lasted for thousands of years. . . . To put it bluntly, it is necessary to bring about a brief reign of terror in every rural area; otherwise we could never suppress the activities of the counterrevolutionaries in the countryside or overthrow the authority of the gentry. To right a wrong, it is necessary to exceed the proper limits; the wrong cannot be righted without doing so."
Exceeding the “proper limits” can include summary execution and violence.
“Shooting. This is confined to the worst local bullies and bad gentry and is carried out by the peasants jointly with other sections of the popular masses. . . . The execution of one such big member of the bad gentry . . . reverberates throughout a whole [county] and is very effective in eradicating the remaining evils of feudalism.”
Mao asserted, “Every revolutionary comrade must support this change or he will be a counterrevolutionary.”
One month after Mao delivered this report, Chiang Kai-shek initiated a violent purge of his Communist allies.
Mao always understood that revolutionary outbursts could occur only with the backing of armed force.
In August 1927, Mao reiterated his position that military forces were necessary to seize political power.
Shortly after Chiang’s purge, the Communist Party organized a series of failed regional uprisings that ended with their remnant forces retreating into isolated mountain bases.
After consolidating their base areas, Mao and his comrades proceeded to implement the vision of rural revolution described in his reports, orchestrating them through staged struggle sessions in militarily secured villages.
The party mobilized the village poor in public meetings to accuse, confront, humiliate, and expropriate the property of village elites.
Beatings and summary executions were a regular part of the process.
“Class struggle” orchestrated as part of a set script was the primary means employed by the CCP to break the political and economic power of village elites, redistribute land, and promote new village leaders loyal to the party.

Political Impact of the Land Revolution

Revolutionary land reform had political consequences that were just as important as the economic ones.
The assault on landlords demolished the existing foundations of both political and economic power in the countryside.
A new scaffolding of party-state power was inserted into this power vacuum.
Political activists and party members were mobilized into the land reform campaign and emerged as village leaders in a new state structure.
This new state would not rely on local landowning and merchant families to exercise power.
This was political revolution in the guise of land reform.
It was designed to utterly destroy the wealth and influence of prior elites, and to permanently stigmatize them and their descendants.
It recruited a new generation of party members and rural leaders.
These leaders owed their positions, and their allegiance, to the new party-state.
The process of land reform demonstrated the overwhelming power of the party to destroy its perceived opponents and remake society in a way that previously seemed unimaginable.
It created support for the new regime by granting land.
The process implicated village populations in the violence of the revolution by mobilizing them to participate in violent struggle sessions.

William Hinton's Account

William Hinton left a detailed account of this rural revolution, reporting sympathetically on the movement in central Shanxi.
The first step was an “antitraitor campaign,” including public struggle sessions against village leaders who had collaborated with the Japanese.
Communist cadres organized struggle sessions and ordered the entire village to attend.
Cadres yelled accusations, slapped, and punched the targets.
The cadres identified activists who were instructed to begin the accusations at the mass meeting.
The struggle session became more effective, and there were more shouted accusations and threats of violence.
Some higher-ranking officials came to the village for a more extensive and emotional accusation meeting resulting in two of the targets being condemned to death, marched to the edge of the village, and shot.
Their property was confiscated and distributed to villagers.
The party began its campaign against wealthy village households, focusing on landlords.
Village cadres led struggle sessions, and beat landlords to reveal where they had stored their money and gold.
The heads of prominent local families were subjected to struggle sessions.
Accusations, beatings, forced confessions, and torture were used to extract information about hidden wealth.
The property of these individuals was seized and distributed to the village poor.
By mid-1946, a new village government was in place, and there were enough party members to form a party branch committee.
The new leaders engaged in corruption, coercion, beatings, sexual harassment, and even rape, with little recourse by powerless villagers.
A “work team” investigated the behavior of the village leaders and party branch.
They set up a peasants’ association, elected new leaders, and set up a new village government.
They documented landholding patterns prior to the land seizures and classified households.
Revolutionary land reform was above all an act of state building.
It destroyed the foundation of the previous order, cleared the ground for new political organizations, recruited new leaders from among formerly marginal social groups, and granted benefits to the vast majority of farmers.
It created state machinery that for the first time in Chinese history could directly collect taxes from individual households.

Changes in Local Society

In Chinese imperial dynasties, the state structure extended no lower than the county seat.
County magistrates were responsible for collecting taxes and keeping local order.
Villages were essentially governed autonomously by local propertied elites.
By the 1940s, local society and politics had changed greatly, but the pattern of rule by local elites continued in altered form.
Traditional gentry were replaced by other local notables.
C. K. Yang described the Guangdong village of Nanching in 1948 in terms that had changed little from the imperial era: “In the Republican period, political order within the county functioned mainly through the informal local community leadership, with the county government as the supervising agent; and the village stood as a highly autonomous self-governing unit.”
Clan organizations were responsible for maintaining roads, dykes, and canals, funding village schools, and arming local militia for protection against bandits.
Crop protection teams were also established by groups of poorer and middle-class farmers.
Informally constituted local power groups coexisted with one another in the village.
Class struggle and land reform occurred coincided with the suppression of “local bullies,” House holds were given class labels.
Land, household items, farm tools, and draft animals were seized and redistributed to poorer households.
The political changes were equally radical.
The party established a new power structure backed by armed force.
The crop protection association was disarmed and disbanded.
Soldiers confiscated firearms.
The power of prominent families melted away, and many fled to Hong Kong.
The clan organization was stripped of its property and former social functions.
The first agents of the new state to appear in the village were fully armed soldiers and officers.
After land reform was completed, in the 1951 campaign to “suppress counterrevolutionaries,” sixteen individuals were executed without trial or public explanation, spreading fear among villagers.
The new subdistrict government appointed a village head and vice head, and a new people’s militia directly under the subdistrict government was formed.
Yang concluded, “a development which moved China perceptibly closer to the structural reality of a modern state and immensely increased the collective strength of the nation’s central political power.”

Economic Impact of the Land Revolution

The economic consequences of the land revolution were just as dramatic.
Land expropriated from prosperous families was transferred to poor peasants, creating a remarkably equal distribution of land.
Poor and lower-middle-class peasants comprised more than 57 percent of the rural population but owned only 24 percent of the land in the 1930s.
After land reform, their share of the nation’s farmland almost doubled, to 47 percent.
Rich peasants and landlords suffered drastic losses.
Landlords bore the brunt of the campaign, just as they had borne the brunt of the violent struggle sessions and executions.
Only 2.5 percent of the population, they owned almost 40 percent of the land in the 1930s, but were reduced to barely more than 2 percent after land reform.
Violence was integral to the process.
Moderate but effective land reforms were carried out in postwar Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in the 1950s, leading to a more equal distribution of land and creating the foundation for a prosperous small-holding agriculture and rapid rural development.
From 1949 to 1953, rents for tenant farmers were reduced by law to no more than 37.5 percent of the annual crop yield.
Public land and land expropriated from Japanese owners was sold to landless farmers at a deep discount.
Upper limits were placed on landholdings; and private land in excess of these limits was sold cheaply to small farmers.
Landlords were compensated for the expropriated land in the form of stock in government-owned corporations.
The percentage of families that owned their own farms rose from 36 to 65 percent, and the percentage that rented land dropped from 39 to 11 percent.
Landlord power was essentially broken in rural Taiwan, as independent farmers organized rural credit and savings associations and transport services, and promoted rural industry.

Consolidating Rural Control

The process of change was not smooth, nor was state building without its complications.
In the early 1950s, measures were taken against party members and rural cadres who failed to perform their duties in desired ways.
Some rural cadres expressed satisfaction that the land revolution had achieved its goals and concentrated on economic rather than political activities.
Significant numbers of village party members employed hired labor on their farms, which was viewed as a form of economic exploitation.
This led to a 1951 campaign against “rightist tendencies” in village party organizations.
Ten percent of village officials and party members were expelled and many more subjected to withering criticism and minor forms of punishment.
A second problem that emerged early on was abusive behavior by new village leaders.
This included the suppression of criticism, the use of coercion and intimidation to achieve compliance with party policy, and the routine use of physical intimidation and even severe beatings.
A 1953 campaign targeted these abuses of power.
In many rural regions, new rural governments were established on shaky foundations.
Organized resistance to the new regime soon appeared in reaction to demands for large grain deliveries to the new military government.
Leadership posts were handed out to individuals who initially seemed cooperative with PLA forces when they passed through, but many later led popular resistance.
After the PLA moved on, anti-Communist guerrillas gained strength and the CCP was soon forced to withdraw from twenty-eight besieged counties.
The battle to bring all of Guizhou fully under control continued well into 1951.
The PLA returned and employed violently coercive methods described as “terroristic.”
After China entered the Korean War in October 1950, the new regime became increasingly concerned about internal security and launched a nationwide campaign to “suppress counterrevolution.”
The campaign aimed at eliminating groups that the regime considered to be political and social rivals.
This included former Nationalist soldiers and party members, bandits, local strongmen, leaders of religious sects and secret societies, Catholic priests and Protestant ministers, and ordinary criminals.
Like land reform, the campaign aimed at eliminating groups that the regime considered to be political and social rivals.
The campaign was reminiscent of land reform, with public trials, denunciation meetings, imprisonments, and executions.
An estimated 1.5 to 2 million people died during land reform from 1947 to 1952.
Internal party reports suggest a minimum number of 710,000 executions during the campaign to suppress counterrevolution, with another 1.2 million imprisoned.
Unofficial estimates are frequently much higher.

Toward Collective Farms

The rural economy recovered quickly from the civil war, and there were signs that China’s new system of small family farms would raise rural living standards.
Rural markets revived, household incomes rose, and the first years of the People’s Republic were a welcome respite from previous years of foreign invasion and civil war.
The new regime’s goal was not to create a system of smallholding private agriculture.
This was made clear in Mao’s 1953 “General Line for the Transition period.”
The next stage was a socialist economy on the Soviet model, and this meant the end of private ownership and the formation of collective farms.
In 1953, rural officials pushed households to pool labor, share draft animals, and engage in mutual aid and cooperative activity.
A new policy for “unified sales and purchase” of grain meant that private grain markets were banned, and all crops had to be sold to state grain procurement stations at prices fixed by the state.
In 1954, grain sales became compulsory.
Despite the fact that farming required more strenuous physical exertion than most urban jobs, the rural grain ration was set lower than in the cities.
Rural China started down the road to Soviet-style collective agriculture, and the only question was how long the process would take.
The first step was the formation of mutual aid teams. Mutual aid teams pooled the labor of a number of households during the busiest periods of planting and harvesting.
The next step was the formation of agricultural cooperatives. In the cooperatives, families continued to own their land, but the cooperative owned draft animals, tools, and any machinery.
The final stage was the collective farm—land was no longer owned and cultivated by families, but was consolidated into large farms that were under collective ownership and run by village leaders appointed by the party.
A collective farm was managed like a factory, with collective members in the role of employees.

Disagreements on Collectivization Speed

Mao consistently pushed for more rapid transformation of China’s economy toward a Soviet model than the Soviet Union and other Chinese leaders thought wise.
Stalin counseled Mao to move slowly, keeping existing economic structures in place for the foreseeable future.
Mao was determined to move China rapidly along the path to socialism as laid out in the Short Course.
Stalin asserted that rapid economic transformation could not be obtained through the mere application of political will.
Stalin believed that China was more backward economically, unprepared to move directly to socialism, and that to make this attempt would set back economic development.
Many other Chinese leaders shared this view.
Mao implicitly rejected this position in the early 1950s, and by the early 1960s, he explicitly criticized this shift by Stalin.
Mao was characteristically in a hurry to push revolution forward as quickly as possible and did not believe that China was as backward as Stalin thought.
After Stalin’s death in March 1953, Mao immediately pushed on with mutual aid teams and cooperatives and began a collectivization drive that initially was to be completed in the early 1960s.
After clashes with other leaders in 1957 about the pace of collectivization, Mao denounced several for “rightism” and called for the immediate completion of collectivization by 1958.
Village cadres began organizing mutual aid teams in 1951.
By 1953 half of all households were members, and by 1954, 85 percent.
After Mao forced the pace of collectivization in the “high tide” of 1955 and 1956, cooperatives were formed very rapidly: 62 percent of households joined them by the end of 1955, and a reported 100 percent by the end of 1956.
The decision to forge ahead even faster to full-scale collective farms was made near the end of 1957 and, in a massive mobilization that began near the end of that year, 100 percent of households were reportedly absorbed into collective farms by the end of 1958.
Nonetheless, there was widespread local resistance, even isolated rebellions, and considerable hardship and local hunger created by rural cadres who felt compelled to complete the process rapidly and at any cost.

The Village as a Collective Farm

The result of the collectivization drive was a radically new form of social and economic organization.
The fruits of land reform lasted for a remarkably short period of time.
The land gained by poorer households was no longer theirs, and the ability of farmers to decide what to produce was completely lost.
Household farming was pushed almost to extinction.
The rural markets that depended on family production largely disappeared, replaced by state purchasing stations.
Now all land, tools, and draft animals were under collective ownership and control.
By the late 1950s, collective farms doubled as units of government and as economic enterprises.
The farm population in a county was organized into communes.
The commune headquarters was the lowest branch of the state bureaucracy.
Communes had an average population of around 15,000 and usually spanned a number of separate villages.
Each commune contained an average of fifteen production brigades of around 220 households and 980 people.
A production brigade was roughly equivalent to a village. Each brigade, in turn, was divided into an average of seven production teams.
The production team, the basic unit of agricultural organization, averaged just over thirty households and around 145 people by the early 1970s.
The production brigades and teams had their own heads, accountants, and other officials, whose salaries were part of brigade and team budgets.
Commune leaders made production decisions based on targets sent down from the county, which were passed down to the brigades and teams.
The leaders of brigades and teams were in charge of fulfilling the plans.
They assigned jobs to individual farmers and organized planting, harvesting, processing, storage, and transport.
Farmers received “work points” for their assigned labor, which were recorded in team accounts and accumulated over the year.
Any cash surpluses in the collective accounts were divided among households according to the number of work points that individuals in the family accumulated over the year.
Each member of the team also received basic grain rations.
Because rural residents could only procure grain from their production teams, farmers were effectively blocked from spending significant periods of time away from the village.
Farmers were also subject to involuntary and uncompensated “service labor” on road building and water conservation projects.
Farmers were essentially tied to the land in a form of bonded labor.
Collective agriculture fully consolidated the state procurement system.
Staple grains, oil-bearing crops, and cash crops could be sold only to state purchasing stations, at state-set prices.
The system permitted state planning agencies to control the terms of trade with the farm sector and to directly influence the mix of crops that were grown.
Soviet-style collective agriculture was designed to extract grain in large volumes and at low prices in order to fuel rapid industrial development in cities.
Low food prices permitted lower wages for urban workers, which left more funds for capital investment in the industrial economy.
Cropping decisions became increasingly focused on staple crops.
The prohibition of independent off-farm employment and nonagricultural sidelines by households forced China’s peasants into subsistence agriculture.
The demands for high production and sales targets by the state, and the setting of deliberately low procurement prices, meant that many residents on collective farms found their grain rations to be increasingly tight and their cash incomes depressed.
Household production was frowned upon, and in some periods punished severely.
Chickens, ducks, hogs, and fishponds were maintained by production teams and brigades.
Some brigades and communes organized off-farm enterprises.
Workers were paid in work points and at times partially in cash.
The periodic rural markets that had characterized village life in China for centuries went into deep decline.
In their place, a state procurement system appropriated agricultural products from collective farms.
The emphasis on staple grain production reduced the variety of crops and sideline products that was typical under household agriculture, effectively pushing Chinese farmers into grain-centered subsistence agriculture.
This kept cash incomes low relative to urban areas.
Differences in living standards within brigades and teams were reduced even further than was the case after land reform.
Certain jobs in a collective were less arduous but had a higher work-point valuation, while unskilled field labor earned fewer work points.
These changes gave rural cadres considerably more power than they had before collectivization.

Effects on Rural People and Cadres

Huaiyin Li stated that “one of the major consequences was the creation of co-op cadres as a privileged group in the village society.”
After the creation of collective structures, “they alienated themselves from the rest of the community because of their privileges; they received plenty of workpoint subsidies and, without doing much work, they earned more income than most strong laborers did.”
They controlled all aspects of the co-op economy.
The shift was marked by an increasing reliance on administrative orders, coercion, and in some cases the abuse of farmers in the form of shouting and beatings.
This also gave rural cadres the opportunity, for the first time, to engage in “various forms of corruption and malpractice.”
Agricultural collectivization not only enabled the state to extend its reach down to each household but also resulted in the creation of millions of grassroots cadres.

Rural China Transformed

In ten years, the CCP radically transformed rural China.
Chinese states had always been distant from village life, collecting taxes through local elites but otherwise leaving rural communities largely to themselves.
Land tenure patterns varied enormously across China.
Secret societies and religious sects were widespread.
Christian missionaries made converts deep into the countryside in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Banditry was common.
The extension of state power into rural China began with the Communist Party’s establishment of a monopoly on the use of armed force.
Bandits, private militias, secret societies, organized religion, and religious sects were suppressed.
It was ultimately armed force that backed the revolutionary land reform that eliminated prior village elites.
The first step in the extension of state power was to destroy social groups that exercised authority and to obliterate the economic foundation for their elite status.
As they destroyed previous structures of wealth and power, the party drew poor peasants into political involvement as land reform activists and, after training and indoctrination, elevated them to new positions of village leadership.
Redistributing land and other forms of wealth among villagers, the party created a reservoir of support, while at the same time demonstrating beyond all doubt the reach and capacity of the new state.
The CCP quickly moved to extend its control into the operation of agriculture itself.
The land and draft animals distributed to families during land reform were rapidly merged into collective farms.
The state and its village representatives now controlled decisions about production; they controlled the crops after harvesting; they controlled the sales and distribution of the products; and they controlled the cash proceeds and distributed incomes to farmers.
They also controlled the labor of farmers and could prohibit their departure from collective farms.
The land reform represented an initial rural revolution that radically transformed the economic structure of rural China and greatly extended the reach of the state into village life.
Collectivization represented a second rural revolution that radically transformed the economy in a very different direction and extended the reach of the state even more deeply into activities that had for millennia been the province of kinship groups and households.