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Plebeian Power: Rethinking the Politics of the Masses in the Chinese Cultural Revolution
Organizer: Lili Wu, University of Chicago
Chair: Roderick MacFarquhar, Harvard University
Discussant: Joel Andreas, Johns Hopkins University
Conventional understandings of the Cultural Revolution have been dominated by either themes of elite conflicts, or disembodied images of irrational crowds scouring the country with spears and sticks. Based upon the assumption that the Cultural Revolution was a profound social upheaval to the course of which masses of ordinary Chinese contributed, this panel explores the manifold roles of the masses in the Cultural Revolution. How were the masses mobilized into collective action? How should we understand the divisions and conflicts among mass organizations? How did the mass movement develop, and what was its political logic? By examining various issues such as mobilization, factionalism, popular resistance, etc., this panel attempts to rethink the question of agency and subjectivity in the context of mass movement in the Cultural Revolution.
This panel brings together scholars in sociology, history, and anthropology. Focusing on the Shanghai workers’ movement, Jun Konno attempts to analyze its development from both structural and processual perspectives. Yiching Wu explores the political and ideological possibilities of the radicalization of the movement from below, by examining the famous case of Shengwulian in Hunan. Lili Wu addresses the complex interactions among the mass forces, the Party bureaucracy, and Mao, and analyzes the processes through which a charisma-mobilized popular movement finally gave away to bureaucratic rule. Extending the temporal perspective to the 1970s, Michel Bonnin studies the collective resistance among the rusticated youth, and brings up the very important connection between mass rebellions in the Cultural Revolution and popular protests in the late 1970s.
The Shanghai Workers’ Movement during the Cultural Revolution: Conjoining Structural and Processual Perspectives
Jun Konno, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Japan
This study reexamines the problem of factionalism of mass organizations during the Cultural Revolution. The dominant approach—usually dubbed the “social interpretation”—suggests that factions emerged when workers acted upon interests and positions defined by preexisting social divisions and positions, often between cadres and workers, and/or between workers who were considered as good “activists” (jiji fenzi) by the Party vis-ŕ-vis ordinary workers and “backwards elements” (luohou fenzi).
This paper explores the workers’ movement in Shanghai in 1966-67, through in-depth study of two factories, the Shanghai Diesel Engine Factory and Gexin Electrical Fittings Factory. What was the significance of social-structural factors in shaping mass mobilization? How did structural factors interact with contingent, processual concerns? What was the interplay between different social positions and political identities? The case studies demonstrate that factional division in factories did not merely emerge as the split between cadres and workers, or between different segments of workers, but also as the split among cadres or workers themselves who responded differently to changing signals contingently generated by the highly fluid political process. The political process must therefore receive adequate consideration as an important analytic aspect in explaining workers’ collective action. The paper concludes with a preliminary conceptual framework for the analysis of mass movement and mobilization in the Cultural Revolution, which attempts to grasp both structural and processual factors in their systematicity and dialectical unity.
Revolution is Dead, Long Live the Revolution!—The Radicalization of the Cultural Revolution from below in Hunan
Yiching Wu, University of Chicago
Though set in motion from the above, the mass movement of the Cultural Revolution quickly took on a life of its own. While all the actors were constrained by the direction defined by the Maoist doctrine, the popular forces unleashed by Mao’s call to rebel sharply contested the official ideology and broadened the struggles considerably. Over a year after the Cultural Revolution was launched, beginning from the early fall of 1967 there were unmistakable signs that the movement was taking a very different turn, and that the Cultural Revolution entered a new stage of retrenchment, demobilization, and deradicalization.
This paper will investigate the dynamics of mass movement in Hunan during 1967-68. Based on archival and field research in Changsha, the paper will focus on the genesis, development, and eventual suppression of Shengwulian (the Hunan Provincial Proletarian Alliance), which was one of the most prominent cases challenging the national trends toward reconstructing the Party apparatus. The Shengwulian case signaled the tentative yet highly significant political and ideological cleavages that were in the making in the Cultural Revolution. Special emphasis will be placed on the various social groupings which were active at such a radicalizing moment, e.g., rusticated youths, marginalized segments of the working class (temporary and contract workers), and the urban jobless, etc. I argue that a study of the processes of radicalization from below will help us better understand the contradictions of the Cultural Revolution, as well as its historical limits and legacy.
The Continuous Revolution in Action and its Limits—A Comparative Study of the Cultural Revolution in Ningxia and Guangdong
Lili Wu, University of Chicago
The upsurge of mass movement from the latter half of 1966 to 1968 severely challenged the party-state bureaucracy. However, instead of creating a new revolutionary order as Mao expected, the mass movement turned out to be a more intractable beast to deal with. After twenty months of political chaos and mass-factional struggles, a disillusioned Cultural Revolution leadership had to order the repression of the mass rebellion that it had brought into being. How do we understand the dynamics of mass movement during the Cultural Revolution? Based on archival research and personal interviews, this paper compares the development of the Cultural Revolution in Ningxia and Guangdong. I argue that charismatic authority and bureaucracy were intertwined in an ambivalent relationship of interdependence and conflict. Crucially, while Mao could mobilize the mass rebels to attack the party bureaucracy, the diverse social and political interests as well as interpretations of the movement among the masses made them difficult to control except by coercive means. However, the ambiguity of the Maoist discourse concerning targets and agents of the movement provided an arena for endless interpretive struggles among different mass factions. Thus, the CR was characterized by a dynamic—and a vicious cycle too—far beyond the will of its leader. This finally forced Mao to resort to the military bureaucracy to reintegrate the tottered regime. An anti-bureaucratic movement ironically ended up in the ascendancy of the military bureaucracy.
Anomie and Resistance among the Educated Youth, 1966-1980: The Contradictions in Creating the New Man in Mao’s China
Michel Bonnin, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales , France
Over 20 million urban youth were sent to the countryside from 1962 to the late 1970s. They were supposed to be transformed into “peasants of a new type” for the rest of their lives. This paper examines the contradictions and tensions inherent in this last Maoist endeavor to create the “Socialist New Man” in China. I will argue that its effects were exactly the opposite of what the official ideology claimed to achieve. The paper will focus on: (1) the rebellion of sent-down youth and their organizational activities during the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1968; and (2) the underground political culture and forms of resistance prevalent among numerous zhiqing communities throughout the 1970s. The zhiqing movement precipitated the collapse of socialist morals and Maoist faith, which culminated in the late 70s. It played an important role in the rise of a youth subculture of literary reading, poetic self-discovery, political dissent, and collective resistance as well. Triggering major movements of political and social protest (1966-68, 1978-80), they were remarkable and often unknown examples or forerunner of today’s more self-conscious “movement of the defense of rights” (weiquan yundong). Based on fictional writings, published and unpublished personal testimonies, and interviews, my paper will present a comprehensive picture of anomie and resistance among the educated youth in Mao’s China.