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TheVillage in the City -RuralMigrants in 1950s Tianjin-
Jeremy Brown (Univ.of California, San Diego)
Ⅰ. Rural Refugees in the City
Ⅱ. Villagers, Jobs, and Families in Tianjin
Ⅲ. Conclusion
Spring 1957 was an exhilarating timefor many Tianjinresidents. A hundred flowers were blooming and contending as open critiques ofthe Communist Party echoed through city work units. But just around the cornerand down an alley from the Hundred Flowers Movement, an unpublicized strugglewas taking place, one just as significant in the lives of the people it touchedas the Hundred Flowers and subsequent Anti-Rightist Movement would be forTianjin’sintellectuals. For most people in the People’s Republic of China, life wasexperienced not as a series of political campaigns, but as a fight to surviveand provide for one’s family.
In the Xi’nanlou area,well south of the stately buildings of the city’s formerforeign concessions, a family of rural refugees gathered. They had fled foodshortages caused by flooding in Hebeiprovince. Once in Tianjin,the refugees began to erect a crude dwelling to protect them from the elements.A local official and policeman arrived on the scene to stop the family fromproceeding. It was city policy to prohibit the building of new shacks (窝铺 wopu), and to dismantle thousands of similar shelters elsewhere in thecity.[sup]1)[/sup]
A daylong standoff ensued between therural family and city authorities. Urban cadres were under instruction topatiently dissuade refugees from erecting shacks and to avoid coercive measuresin tearing down the structures. Police were to avoid involvement in the matter,because just a few days earlier city officers had beaten three refugees whowere attempting to put up a shack. Such ugly scenes were a setback to removingthe dwellings, for they encouraged urban residents to sympathize with ruralrefugees.
But on this day there was no violence.The family continued digging a hole in the ground and propped up skinny woodenbeams, covered the frame with piles of dried reeds, and applied a coat of mudon top of the brittle pond grass.[sup]2)[/sup] The urban official’spersuasion was ineffective. As he explained that rural flood victims couldreceive assistance in their home counties but were not allowed to establishresidence in Tianjin,the family went about its work. “Even if we’re not allowedto put it up, we’ve still got to do it,” one of therefugees said defiantly. “If you’re going totear it down, make a move, but in any case I’m not going todismantle it myself.” The official and policeman watched quietly as thefamily finished building its new home. Rural and urban China hadstared each other directly in the eyes, and on this day the rural family hopingto gain a foothold in the city had gotten the better of the confrontation.
In Western scholarship, the basicinstitutional contours of rural-urban difference in the People’s Republic of China are wellunderstood. But most studies fail to capture the complex dynamic between ruralpeople in the city and the urban officials responsible for keeping them out. Ina 1994 article, Tiejun Cheng and Mark Selden outline the origins of themobility control and food rationing regime that has framed the rural-urbandivide and restricted life opportunities since the 1950s. Cheng and Selden notethat the two-tiered hukou system was never completely impermeable. Particularlyin the 1950s, they write, the ebbs and flows of harvests and employment trendsin both village and urban Chinagave rise to cyclical loosening and tightening on rural migration to cities.[sup]3)[/sup]
Rules were in place restricting the “blindflow” (mangliu盲流) of farmers toChinese cities as early as 1953, but were not entirely effective. Tianjin officials had avague understanding that planned socialist development required limitingrural-urban migration, but their desire to fuel urban industrial growth and toencourage family unity meant that in practice, villagers who wanted in couldget in. Because mobility control in the 1950s was inconsistent and fitful, itfailed to make a dent in the overall trend of rural to urban migration. Cityfactories needed workers, rural people wanted city jobs, and many urbanofficials and employees brought their rural relatives into Tianjin. Government efforts to sendnon-productive workers back to their home villages in 1955 and 1957 set theirtargets low and petered out after a few months, after which point repatriatedworkers could quietly return to Tianjin.
Rural people with family or nativeplace connections in the city were much more difficult to remove than poor,rootless, marginalized flood victims. City officials charged with controllingrural migration to Tianjincould not possibly stop all villagers, so they focused on new arrivals scrapingby on the fringes of urban society. Even so, the job was not easy. Many targetsfor removal from Tianjinresisted or ignored orders to leave the city. It did not help that urbanresidents sometimes took the side of shack dwellers in arguments with cadresfrom the Tianjin Municipal Office to Mobilize Farmers and Disaster Victims toReturn to Villages (天津市动员农民、灾民还乡办公室).Another problem was that city cadres identified and profiled potentialdeportees to villages based on their appearance (dirty and worn clothing),their activities (engaging in hard outdoor physical labor), and their ruralaccents. The result was that rural people who were in Tianjin for legitimate purposes―family visitsor officially approved work―were rounded up and removed simply because of howthey looked and talked.
By peering into the alleyways of aChinese city, we learn that family pressures, personal relationships, and localconcerns made it difficult to comply with central regulations limitingrural-urban migration. As the wall between city and village went up in the1950s, it was not easy to discern who belonged where, especially when manypeople had one foot on each side of the divide. The complex nature of deportingrural people from Tianjinmeant that city officials focused on the most easily identifiable targets forremoval: impoverished victims of floods and grain shortages. Disaster victimshad been coming to Tianjinin search of relief long before 1949. They continued to do so during the firstdecade of the People’s Republic.
Ⅰ. RuralRefugees in the City By the first half of the twentiethcentury, Tianjinwas already a city of migrants, the vast majority of whom came from villages innearby provinces. By 1947 there were far more outsiders than natives in thecity: out of approximately 1,700,000 residents, 688,661 people listed theirnative place as Tianjin, while 805,995 were from Hebei and 143,909 fromShandong.[sup]4)[/sup] During the late Qing and Republican periods, somefarmers came to seek jobs in Tianjin’s small industrial workshops andlarge factories.[sup]5)[/sup] Many others entered the city in search of relieffrom the flat riverine region’s regular floods, which destroyedharvests every few years.[sup]6)[/sup]
Flood, famine, and war refugees were amain source of Tianjin’spopulation growth before 1949. Those who had family members already living in Tianjin moved in withtheir relatives, while people without connections stayed in small guesthousesor built shacks on the outskirts of the city. Their ranks swelled each winteras nearby farmers who had run short on food entered the city. These wintersojourners also lived in homemade lean-tos. During the day they did odd jobs,collected junk, begged on the streets, and took advantage of two guaranteeddaily meals at “porridge yards” (粥厂 zhouchang). The free meals were provided by both government and privatecharities, and organizations like the Red Cross even assisted migrants inbuilding “nests” out of wood, dried reeds, and mud. Tobe sure, Qing and Republican officials did not always welcome flood victims,and authorities attempted to organize refugees to return to their villagesafter the waters had receded.[sup]7)[/sup] But these efforts were limited.Although some seasonal migrants and disaster victims returned home aftervillage conditions improved, others stayed. The shanty neighborhoods on themargins of Tianjin became permanent additions to the city.[sup]8)[/sup] Themost notorious squalor could be found outside the southwest corner of the oldcity walls, in Xushuichi and the “Three Don’t Cares” (三不管 san bu guan) ghetto, so named because the area was ignored by foreignconcession authorities and Chinese officials alike.[sup]9)[/sup]
When the Communists occupied Tianjin in early 1949,they inherited the same social problems and precedents that bedeviled theirimperial, Japanese, and Nationalist predecessors. Flood victims and seasonalmigrants would not stop building shacks and seeking relief simply because a newparty was in power. As we shall see, shacks and beggars continued to appear in Tianjin throughout the1950s. Yet for China’snew rulers, cities were supposed to be hubs of industrial production, notrelief centers. In order to develop industry in the interior, central leaderslimited the growth of coastal financial centers like Tianjin and Shanghai.[sup]10)[/sup]What official documents repeatedly called the urban non-productive (消费 xiaofei) or parasitic (寄生 jisheng) population was either providedwith productive jobs in the city or sent back to rural homes to farm. Duringthe 1950s, new workers―and sometimes their family members―wereallowed to come to Tianjinas long as they found jobs in factories or on construction sites that aidedindustrial development. Rural families fleeing village problems were notofficially welcome, but new leaders of Tianjinfound it difficult to alter long-standing patterns of seeking relief in thecity.
As soon as the Communists took over Tianjin they wereconfronted with a slew of refugees in dire straits. The crumbling Nationalistarmy had destroyed tens of thousands of homes on the outskirts of the city inorder to construct a defense perimeter, leaving more than 100,000 residentshomeless. By all accounts, the city’s new rulers respondedadmirably, providing relief grain to the homeless and helping to rebuild thedwellings.[sup]11)[/sup] By March 1949, tens of thousands of rural refugees,Nationalist soldiers, and landlords and students from the northeast had beensent back to their home villages. The government gave the travelers funds fortransportation and food for the road.[sup]12)[/sup] But a spring droughtfollowed by heavy summer rains in north China led to a new influx of ruralpeople fleeing disaster. In August 1949, the Hailuan river overflowed itsbanks. In Baodi county just north of Tianjin,808 villages were flooded, 56,000 homes were destroyed, and 97% of the fieldswere inundated.[sup]13)[/sup]
A wave of beggars appeared on thestreets of Tianjin and in August 1949 businessmen complained about the problem,writing letters to the editor of Tianjin Daily and appealing to the newgovernment to restore social order.[sup]14)[/sup] Authorities in the newmunicipal government established porridge stations but ruled that only “urbandisaster victims” (市内灾民 shinei zaimin) were allowed to eat citygruel. Unlike in previous years, porridge yards were not open to all on afirst-come, first-served basis. City officials also got in touch with theleaders of nearby counties, who dissuaded rural residents from coming to thecity and encouraged them to permanently relocate in the more sparsely populatednortheast.[sup]15)[/sup] Officials set quotas: 2,000 Baodi residents and 5,000from low-lying Ninghe county were slated to migrate to the northeast. Accordingto archival documents, flood victims were reluctant to leave the Tianjin region forfaraway, unfamiliar places. In September 1949, the Tianjin prefectural commissioner’soffice ordered local counties to smash the “conservativeprovincialism”that was keeping the refugees from departing their home region. “Explainthat all farmers in Chinaare one family,” leaders urged.[sup]16)[/sup]
At this early stage, the newadministrators of Tianjincontinued earlier policies toward rural refugees but also made several significantchanges. The Communists could not stop farmers from seeking succor in the citywhen natural disasters made it impossible to survive in villages. Some ruralrefugees managed to gain a foothold in the city and stayed on, as they had inthe past. But Communist authorities in Tianjinwere unwilling to allow huge numbers of flood refugees to become permanent cityresidents. Relief provisions were again available in the city, but this timeonly for poor city residents. Rural people were to return home and get throughthe floods by working hard. If this was impossible, they were to join othermembers of China’sfarming family in places with more favorable agricultural conditions. We cannotbut assume that officials’ paramount concern during this crisiswas to keep people from starving to death. Yet in differentiating between urbanand rural victims during this first flood crisis, city leaders set in motion apattern that pit city against countryside.
Between 1953 and 1957, floods and foodshortages still affected Tianjin,and farmers continued to come to the city as a survival strategy. But coming asa refugee was just one way into the city. During this period, many ruralmigrants used family connections to get factory jobs, or simply answered thecalls of city enterprises that actively sought out rural workers. Between 1951and 1957 more than 780,000 people entered Tianjin in search of work or to movein with family members, and city enterprises recruited an additional 409,000workers from villages.[sup]17)[/sup] Those who found jobs during this periodmade the gradual but relatively painless transition from rural to urbanresident, from farmer to worker. Farmers turned city workers were acceptable aslong as they met the needs of urban industrial development, the main goal ofthe first five year plan.
There were no easy answers to thequestion of how to quickly modernize cities and villages that had been assailedby a century of imperialism, war, and natural disaster. Yet the centralleadership’sinitial focus on urban industry placed heavy burdens on rural dwellers.Concerned observers noted a deepening divide between city workers and ruralfarmers. At a September 1953 meeting of the Chinese People’sPolitical Consultative Conference, elderly rural reformer Liang Shumingcomplained that since 1949, the party’s excessive emphasis onproduction ignored the welfare of rural people and caused a growing gap betweenworkers and farmers. “Workers are inthe highest heaven, but farmers are the lowest of the low” (工人九天, 农民九地 gongren jiutian, nongmin jiudi),Liang said. “Farmersflee to the cities but are not allowed to go.” He continued, “humanand financial resources are concentrated in cities. Even though I’mnot saying that [farmers] are abandoned or that we are out of touch, I’mafraid that there is a bit of that.”[sup]18)[/sup]
Liang Shuming had touched a sensitivenerve with Chairman Mao Zedong, whose profanity-laced responseimplied that Liang was a representative of the landlord class and had no rightto speak on behalf of China’sfarmers. As scholars Wu Li and Zhu Wenqiang argue, Mao’s vehementreaction discouraged further critical comments about rural-urban differencefrom non-party figures.[sup]19)[/sup] Yet Mao himself continued to ruminate onthe question of whether farmers were worse off than workers. “Villagesare suffering a bit,” Mao said in a talk on agricultural mutual aidsocieties on November 4, 1953, “but we should properly analyze this.Actually they are not suffering that much.” Only the tenpercent of households that lacked labor power were in dire straits, Maoclaimed, but mutual aid societies could provide assistance. Mao allowed thatdisaster victims were a different case. “Disastervictims are suffering,” he said, “but are givenrelief grain.”[sup]20)[/sup]Emergency assistance was intended to keep flooded-out farmers from bringingtheir suffering to cities like Tianjin.
Mao distinguished between the bitterlot of disaster victims and the average farmer, who he claimed was doing welland was “elated” (欢欣鼓舞 huanxin guwu). Tianjin officials charged with keeping ruralpeople out of the city had a more difficult time making such a distinction. Indocuments penned by city officials, “disaster victim” (灾民 zaimin) and “farmer” (农民 nongmin) were often used interchangeably. It was easy enough to assume thatall disaster victims were farmers. But were all farmers refugees?
Many more such people arrived in Tianjin beginning in1954. Massive summer flooding in Hebeiprovince was exacerbated by a 3.5 billion kilogram increase in mandatory stategrain purchases compared with the previous year.[sup]21)[/sup] More than 30,000refugees from the Tianjin and Cangzhou districtsbrought their family members to Tianjin.Most relied on city relatives to get by; others built shacks or lived in oldabandoned military blockhouses (paolou 炮楼).[sup]22)[/sup]The flood refugees were not the only rural people arriving in Tianjin in 1954.According to an internal labor bureau report from April 1955, between January1954 through the end of February 1955, a total of around 120,000 people fromvillages flowed into the city. More than 7,000 had found jobs in Tianjin, which, thereport noted, “encouragedeven more farmers to flow blindly into the city.” Even lessacceptable were those who had not found proper work but still insisted onstaying in the city, resorting to selling their belongings, collecting junk,begging, thieving, or even turning to prostitution.[sup]23)[/sup] Between 1955and early 1958, the Tianjin government attempted to count, classify, and removeimpoverished migrants who lacked urban relatives and who were not contributingto urban socialist construction.
On May 3, 1955, the Tianjin municipalgovernment sent a notice to all urban districts on “mobilizingvagrant begging disaster victims to return to their villages and produce” (dongyuanliulang qigai de zaimin huixiang shengchan 动员流浪乞丐的灾民回乡生产).Although the title of the notice referred exclusively to disaster victims, itnoted that both refugees and farmers in Tianjinhad compelled city “masses” to complain to urbanauthorities. “SinceFebruary, vagrant disaster victims begging on the street have graduallyincreased. These people often ask for food at people’s homes or onthe streets. Some use the excuse of selling ash paper (灰纸 huizhi) or firewood to enter residences and when no one is home they stealthings. Some push their bawling children down the street on small carts,causing many people to gather and stare, which has a bad influence.”Street offices, the lowest level of Communist authority in the city, were towork with local police stations to investigate people who came to Tianjin to beg. Beggarsand those with “improper income” were to bemobilized to return home and, if necessary, provided with travel funds. If anindividual declined to return home voluntarily, he or she could be detained andthe mobilization effort could continue in a detention center.[sup]24)[/sup]
Local offices sprung into action. OnMay 15, 1955, police officers in district seven (now part of Nankai district)discovered 75 rural people from 15 families who had built shacks and werebegging for food, cutting grass, or doing other odd jobs. Only one family’sland had actually been inundated, but the other families had eaten up all oftheir warehoused grain and could not afford to purchase more. Probably unawareof Chairman Mao’s assurances that suffering disaster victims wouldget relief grain, the families told police officers that government assistancewas not enough. The reporting officer recorded the name and native place ofeach family, and noted that “each of the above families has beenrepeatedly mobilized but they firmly refuse to return to their villages.”[sup]25)[/sup]
Later in May, police officersand civil affairs cadres in the Wandezhuang area of district seven completed amuch larger survey of 1,699 “disaster victims,” 864women and 385 men mostly from nearby rural counties.[sup]26)[/sup] Officialsclassified as refugees many more people than those who had fled immediateperil. Almost anyone with a rural background who scraped together a marginalliving in the city was counted, including people who came seasonally or eventhose who had lived in the city for more than ten years. The vast majority ofthe outsiders, 1,321, stayed with family or friends. Ms. Liu, a 51-year-oldwoman from neighboring Wuqing county, moved in with her daughter and son-in-lawZhang Shiqing, who worked as an inspector at the Tianjin Streetcar Company. Liu’sdaughter said that thanks to Zhang’s monthly salary of 50 yuan, itwas not a problem to feed one more mouth in the city. It would have been moreof a burden to send money back to Wuqing, she said. Although Liu was counted inthe survey, the city did not ask her to return to her village. City residentswere implored to discourage their family members from coming to Tianjin, but the civilaffairs bureau instructed cadres not to “directlymobilize” refugeesliving with city relatives.[sup]27)[/sup]
The civil affairs bureau’sreport on Wandezhuang noted with some surprise that people labeled as “disastervictims”were making and saving money. Officials counted 118 peddlers who lived in smallinns or stayed with fellow villagers. Twenty-three year old Feng Laofu cartedpeanuts to Tianjinfrom his village in March 1955 and roasted them at a street stand, makingaround 1.5 yuan a day. An additional 194 of those surveyed had found temporaryor long-term work, some through the Wandezhuang labor market (人市 ren shi), others through small factory proprietors or family connections.Another group of people who said they regularly came to the city during theslack agricultural season were counted as disaster victims, including 55 whocollected and resold junk. Xing Qiulu, a 47 year old man from Cang county,lived in a small communal dwelling and saved around 0.3 yuan every day fromjunk recycling, enough to send five yuan home to his family shortly before cityofficials interviewed him.
Only eleven of the outsiders counted inWandezhuang admitted to begging. All of them lived in inns, and four were “careerbeggars” (职业乞丐 zhiye qigai). It is not clear how theselong-term residents of Tianjinqualified as “disaster victims,” but the policeofficers and civil affairs cadres counted them anyway. Liu Zhanyuan, a 36 yearold originally from neighboring Jinghai county, had lived in a Tianjin inn in since 1945. He went out earlyeach morning to an area of workers’ dormitories, where he would “tellthe masses that he had been hit by disaster and could not survive. If themasses do not give him money he pretends that he is dying.” Liumade up to three yuan by the end of each workday, when he took a bus back tohis inn. He told his interviewers that he wanted to be a peddler but did nothave the capital to get started.
At the end of their report, officialsanalyzed why people had come to the city. They concluded that because Tianjin’s “urbanpeople” andthe “masses”from nearby counties had strong family ties, villagers came because of foodshortages but also to pay family visits. Others came seasonally to peddle orengage in odd jobs, which in effect became their agricultural “sideline”activity.[sup]28)[/sup] The problem, the report claimed, was that after comingto Tianjin, rural people found city incomes and became dissatisfied withagricultural production. Their presence “adds to the laborforce and definitely affects the employment of unemployed workers, marketmanagement, the grain and oil supply, and social order.”
Local authorities were aware that theflow of rural people into Tianjinwas not limited to immediate “disaster victims,” yetthe distinction between all farmers and refugees was unclear. Generally the “disastervictim”label was applied to the most marginal population in the city. Certainly somevillagers initially left their homes because of flooding and food shortages.Others followed after they learned about opportunities on the margins of theurban economy. As people came and found ways to get by, more were encouraged tofollow. City officials were determined to limit this flow. In the 1950s, theyfocused primarily on those without firm family or work ties.
In July 1955 the municipal governmentestablished a population office staffed by cadres transferred from the publicsecurity, civil affairs, labor, and commerce bureaus, the women’sleague and youth league, and the party-run union. The new office opened itsdoors at a time of tightening controls on rural-urban movement nationwide. In1955, party center made it more difficult for individuals to obtain migrationpermits, and also established a grain rationing regime that differentiatedbetween city and village residents.[sup]29)[/sup] In Tianjin, each citydistrict set up population offices, while street offices formed work teamsresponsible for propaganda and mobilization work. Between July 1955 and March1956, 128,200 people left the city and returned to villages. Overall the Tianjin governmentdeclared that the project had successfully “increased thepower of agricultural production, and also decreased the nonproductivepopulation and appropriately laid the base for a socialist city.”
Yet problems arose that had “evileffects among the masses.” Some cadres issued coercive orders andset deadlines for leaving the city, summarily canceling household registrationpermits, deducting grain, and confiscating peddling licenses. At discussionmeetings targets were not allowed to leave until they spoke up and expressedwillingness to go back to their villages. Such rash methods had led to twosuicides and three other attempted suicides among people targeted for removal.[sup]30)[/sup]
Beyond the immediate tragedy ofsuicide, city officials were concerned that outright coercion turned cityresidents against government efforts to remove rural people from Tianjin. Street levelpropaganda urged city people to help farmers sell their furniture and toforgive housing debts and rents. It told urban residents that agricultural andindustrial production were equally important, and claimed that farmers flowinginto the city hurt the nation and also caused themselves personal hardship. Ifthe urban “masses” sawthe government’sharsh policies as the cause of migrants’ pain, theywould be less likely to encourage rural people, especially family and friendsfrom nearby villages, to pick up and leave.
After mid-1956, city population officeswere disbanded and cadres returned to their original units. But rural people,many of whom continued to be categorized as disaster victims, still came to Tianjin. Another wave ofdamaging floods and hailstorms assailed the countryside surrounding Tianjin in summer 1956.To the north, Baodi, Anci (now part of Langfang municipality), and Wuqingcounties were hit hard; in Cang county to the south, flooding was even worsethan in 1954.[sup]31)[/sup] Crop shortages followed in early 1957. Theshortfall was especially grave in Wuqing and some parts of Baodi. There,authorities drastically cut grain allowances, in some cases slashing theguaranteed monthly grain standard by a third to around 7-10 kilograms perperson.[sup]32)[/sup] Refugees built 600 new shacks in Tianjin during thesecond half of 1956, and by spring 1957 city officials estimated that thenumber of farmers in the city had doubled since December 1956.[sup]33)[/sup] In1956 and 1957, over 205,000 farmers had moved into Tianjin.[sup]34)[/sup]
In April 1957, vice mayor Wan Xiaotangestablished a temporary organization to handle the new arrivals. Li Yingjie,vice-secretary of the city’s civil affairs bureau, was nameddirector of the newly formed Tianjin Municipal Office to Mobilize Farmers andDisaster Victims to Return to Villages. This time around, city leaders attemptedto learn from the mistakes of 1955 and 1956, but new problems arose. In theirearlier efforts, cadres had committed errors because they became impatient withsimple verbal persuasion, which was relatively ineffective against migrants.People who wanted to avoid leaving the city could simply wait for the pressureto subside after the campaign was declared a success. Those who had left couldthen come back again. As the director of one street office in Hedong districtcomplained, “Thejob of mobilizing people to return to villages is like wiping your ass with awatermelon rind, it’s gone before you’re finished.”[sup]35)[/sup]
As in 1955, city officials attempted tomake the task easier by focusing on the most vulnerable populations: peoplestaying with distant relatives or friends were targeted, while people livingwith direct relatives were not. Those who had found temporary work could finishout their contracts. But people living out in the open, either in homemadesheds or on the floors of waiting rooms in the city’s trainstations, were sitting ducks.
The 1957 campaign targeted marginalvillagers who were least likely to have close links with city people and workunits. But in the eyes of city leaders, cadres and urban residents were showingexcessive concern toward jobless refugees who lacked family ties in Tianjin. Empathycomplicated deportation work. According to an internal work bulletin, localofficials failed to criticize refugees’ insufficient understanding of “economizingto get through a lean year.” Cadres showed “one-sidedsympathy” forfarmers living in shacks and doubted whether returning them to villages wouldreally solve their problems. The hesitant attitude of officials encouraged somerefugees to “exaggeratetheir difficulties and seek sympathy from the masses, allowing them to reachtheir goal of building a shack or not getting one dismantled.”[sup]36)[/sup]This is how the steadfast family with whom we began our story ended up with acompleted dwelling.
In order to dislocate the still growingshantytowns, the office in charge of removing villagers needed to win overstreet-level cadres, police officers, and city people, in addition to therefugees themselves. In effect, urban residents were pitted against migrants.Each group was urged to understand its proper place. A May 14, 1957 workbulletin stressed the need to propagandize residents in neighborhoods wherepeople were likely to erect makeshift homes. Before instructing refugees totear down their lean-tos, local cadres were to “explain therationale of prohibiting shack-building to the masses in the area” inorder to “avoidthe problem of the masses simply sympathizing with the disaster victims becausethey do not understand the policy.”[sup]37)[/sup] What urbancitizens failed to understand was that farmers were supposed to wait for grainrelief to come to them in their home villages. The city could not accommodatethem.
These first government appeals to cityresidents largely fell on deaf ears. After a month of propaganda work, the headoffice again complained that city people, including cadres and students, didnot “understandthe practical situation” that rural counties, not the city,could solve farmers’ difficulties. Too many urban residents still “sympathizewith the disaster victims and express dissatisfaction with government policy,which has added obstacles to mobilization work.”[sup]38)[/sup]
The city’s goal was toavoid an alliance between aggrieved rural shack dwellers and sympathetic urbanpeople. City workers, many of whom had only recently left behind a life of farmlabor, were reminded of the importance of agriculture. Propagandaexplained that leaving villages and begging for food was partly a “thoughtproblem”brought on by “detestingagricultural labor and envying city life.” Bad classelements in villages had “incited” the ruralmasses to “destroythe nation’sgrain policy” bybegging in cities instead of solving their problems at home.[sup]39)[/sup] Thiseducational material urged concerned city people to stop interfering when localofficials pressed refugees to dismantle shacks. A related goal was to build upa network of urban activists who would be on the lookout for the first signs ofa rural person building a shack. The activists could dissuade the builders onthe spot, before the shack’s frame and walls were erected.
Even when city residents agreed to sidewith local officials to persuade refugees to remove their mud-caked reeds andwooden frames, rural people still “clashed horns” (顶牛 dingniu) and resisted displacement. At times persuasion failed, even aftercadres and activists offered to help solve refugees’practical problems in villages. If the prospective deportees doubted that theywould be properly accommodated upon return, the city could send someone toaccompany them.
In some cases, shack dwellers acceptedthese offers, dismantled their nests, and agreed to return home. But othermobilization targets still wavered. A work bulletin allowed that in thesedifficult circumstances the matter could be handled forcibly and the resisterscould be detained. Persuasion could continue in the city-run detention center (收容所 shourongsuo). “Some households were forciblydismantled, or activists did the dismantling,” the reportnoted. “Thismethod is certainly effective but we realize that it can only be supplementary.Leaders should cautiously control it. It absolutely cannot replace persuasionand mobilization work.”[sup]40)[/sup]
As we have seen, urban officials had atough time removing refugees who had invested their energy and scant resourcesto build shelters in or near dense city neighborhoods. It was easier to deportrural people if they had no contact with urban residents and had no opportunityto set down roots, however tenuous, in the city. This is what city officialsdiscovered when they carried out “assault mobilization” (tujidongyuan 突击动员) roundups atTianjin’strain stations and street corners. But it was impossible to completely stoppeople who wanted to enter the city. How could authorities be entirely certainwho was a “farmer” or “disastervictim” andwho was in the city legitimately? Unwanted visitors who sought assistance in Tianjin exploited thisconfusion.
Between May 16 and May 26, 1957, thenumber of people living at Tianjin’sthree train stations increased precipitously. At the main east station therewere around 2,000 rural people sleeping on the floor, and there were 600 moreat the north and west stations. The city reported that around eighty percent ofthe disaster victims were from Wuqing county; most of them were women, elderlypeople, and children. Aside from a few young people who cut grass or worked oddjobs, the refugees went out early each morning to beg. Five officials fromTianjin and others from Hebei province headed for Wuqing, Baodi, and Ancicounties to demand that local governments transfer relief grain to needy areasand establish “dissuasionstations” (quanzuzhan 劝阻站) to stoppotential migrants before they left their home counties. Tianjin officials also formed a work team ofcadres and railway police to “assault” the trainstations.[sup]41)[/sup]
During the last five days of May 1957,around 30 city officials placed 2,722 residents of Tianjin’s railwaystations on trains back to their home counties. But the total number of peoplelying on the floors held steady. The problem was that as soon as a train left Tianjin, another arrivedwith more refugees. In early June, the number of city cadres assigned to trainstation deportation work jumped to 60, and their strategy shifted. Instead ofemptying out the waiting rooms, city cadres focused on arriving trains. Theyrounded up passengers as soon as they disembarked, offered food to “temporarilyallay their hunger,” and put them on the next train out. This methodwas effective, and the number of people living at Tianjin’s east stationplummeted from 1,521 on May 31 to 691 on June 4.
Prospective migrants got the messagethat they would not be welcomed at city train stations. Unfortunately, a workreport admitted, “we discovered that during dissuasion work on theplatforms, the scope of those rounded up was too broad and some masses who werenot disaster victims were held and delayed for a while. Pay attention tocorrecting this erroneous tendency from now on.”[sup]42)[/sup]
How were officials to discern who was adisaster victim and who was simply a member of the masses taking a train to Tianjin? They profileddeportation targets based on their clothing. People from rural backgrounds whoworked at Tianjinfactories in the 1950s claimed they could easily distinguish between citypeople and villagers. One factory worker who came to Tianjin in 1951 as aseventeen year old recalled that even poor city residents wore Western-styleshirts (衬衫 chenshan) and jackets (大衣 dayi), while farmers wore handmadeChinese-style shirts (xiaogua 小褂) orhomespun cotton coats. In the mid-50s, this worker’s rural wifecame to the city for a short visit. She told me that a woman who lived upstairslooked at her and immediately decided that her clothes were “toorustic and lousy” (tai su, tai po 太俗太破) for the city.The well intentioned neighbor gave the young villager extra cloth rationtickets so she could get something new to wear.[sup]43)[/sup]
Rural people attempting to get to Tianjin by train in June1957 were aware of this distinction and took advantage of it. Officials at thetrain station reported that some disaster victims had begun to “playtricks” toavoid getting rounded up. Some wore new clothes and claimed that they had cometo Tianjin tosee relatives. Further questioning revealed that the gussied up visitors had nofamily or friends in the city. Savvy rural people tried to pass as members ofthe “masses.”They realized that they could not look like “disastervictims” ifthey wanted to get past the assault brigade on the platform. We do not know howmany newly tailored rural people were able to convince the city work team letthem proceed. But the migrants clearly knew that they were being profiled basedon appearance.
In order to bypass the cordon at theeast station, disaster victims also traveled by boat or bought train tickets toTianjin’swest or north stations, where the number of people sleeping on waiting roomfloors continued to grow. City officials noted that some of the growth camefrom new arrivals but that others had been sleeping in city streets and weredriven inside by recent rains. By June 8 cadres had begun to regain the upperhand. On the spot deportations from the north station and officials working thegraveyard shift at the west station had reduced the total number of peopleliving in waiting rooms to 579. The only major remaining problem was the onehundred or so people at the east station from more distant Shandongand Anhuiprovinces. City officials wrote that these outsiders were “difficultto mobilize and should be temporarily detained in order to continue mobilizingthem to return to their native places.”[sup]44)[/sup]
Authorities were so pleased with theresults of assault tactics at the train station that later in June theyattempted the same strategy in the city at large. Quick round-ups of suspecteddisaster victims on Tianjinstreets proved to be less effective than in the train station’scontained environment. Again, it was difficult to tell who was a deportablerefugee and who was allowed to stay. It was not enough for city officials torely on appearance alone. According to the summary bulletin of the weeklong “assaultmobilization and detention of disaster victims sleeping on the streets andbegging,” 337people returned to villages and 106 were detained. The problem was that somecadres “didnot check people’s status carefully enough” and could notdistinguish between different types of people. Some pedicab workers, temporaryworkers, and legitimate residents of guest houses were rounded up and sent outof the city, “causinggreat unhappiness.”
Assault round-ups were effective ingetting people to leave the city, but those with jobs or on family visits werenot supposed to be targeted. Presumably most of the people mistakenly deportedoriginally had rural roots, for they too were “returned tovillages” (还乡 huanxiang).[sup]45)[/sup] But in their zeal to rid the city of disastervictims, city cadres cast their nets too wide. Anyone who looked rural, wasengaged in hard outdoor physical labor, or with a non-fixed residence becamesuspect, even if he or she was contributing to Tianjin’s socialistconstruction in an officially recognized manner. Sloppy cadres also falselyenticed targets by telling them they would have jobs waiting for them at thedetention center. When the detainees discovered that they had been tricked,they were understandably upset.
By fall 1957, deportation anddemolition work slowed down. In September, city and district branch officescharged with removing “farmers and disaster victims”issued their final work bulletins. In Hongqiao district, to the north of thecity, officials had removed 2,226 people and detained 940, totaling 63 percentof the 5,607 people originally targeted for removal. Hongqiao spent around5,000 yuan covering transportation costs and relief stipends, and provided morethan 3,000 kilograms of grain to the deportees.[sup]46)[/sup]
The head municipal office reported that1,065 shacks had been demolished citywide; more than 5,000 shack dwellers hadreturned to villages. Only 219 shacks remained, all but 13 of them in Nankaidistrict.[sup]47)[/sup] In early September, city work teams investigated theofficial class backgrounds of the shack inhabitants. All landlords, richfarmers, or people with “historical problems”were criticized, then their homes were “forciblydemolished” (强制的拆除 qiangzhi de chaichu). The decision todistinguish between different types of shack dwellers expedited the task ofcity officials charged with emptying out the shantytowns. Even though theshacks of bad class elements had been standing for a long time and somefamilies had “laid down deep roots” (根紮的深 gen zha de shen), simply tearing downthe dwellings was easier work than persuading recalcitrant refugees from doingit themselves.[sup]48)[/sup]
This turn toward class analysisfollowed on the heels of an August 8, 1957 directive from party center orderingChina’s “entirevillage population” to carry out “debates” onsocialist education. The Anti-Rightist Campaign was heating up and the partyfelt compelled to defend its rural record against the “many people whoin the past had doubted the policy of state grain purchases.”Party center held that debates on grain policy and the relationship betweenworkers and farmers really came down to a discussion about socialism andcapitalism. The August directive predetermined the results of this debate. Themasses were to expose and condemn the destructive activities of landlords, richfarmers, and counterrevolutionaries. They would also advocate exercising “necessaryrestraints” onvillage “loaferswho do not labor”―the same language used to criticize farmers who hadflowed into Tianjin.[sup]49)[/sup]
In singling out the most marginal ofthe marginalized shack dwellers in Tianjinfor coercive treatment, city officials were working within the context of anational battle against “rightist” enemies ofsocialism. They were also faced with the difficult and unpleasant task ofdisplacing long-term residents of shantytowns. It made sense for them to focuson the most vulnerable targets of all―rural people with bad classlabels.
Ⅱ.Villagers, Jobs, and Families in Tianjin Official efforts to limit the flow ofrural people to Tianjinfocused overwhelmingly on those who lacked support networks in the city. Thistrend exposes the limits of the state’s ability to police rural-urbanmigration and reveals a hierarchy of new arrivals to the city. People fleeinghardship in the countryside who begged and slept on the streets, in shacks, oron floors were at the bottom of the totem pole. They were often outdoors, intrain stations, or in marginal neighborhoods like Xushuichi, places where poorrural migrants were concentrated well before 1949. City authorities couldgenerally identify such villagers, although cadres who relied on appearancesalone found it impossible to avoid mistakenly rounding up rural people withcity jobs or family connections, a category that vastly outnumbered rootlessflood refugees. Most rural migrants to Tianjinrelied on family or native place networks for support. Generally these migrantswere completely untouched by 1950s efforts to deport farmers from the city.
Wei Rongchun was a typical case.Around midday one afternoon in 1951, the seventeen year old boarded a smallboat in Baodi county.[sup]50)[/sup] After a full 28 hours of floating andpaddling down the canals and rivers north of Tianjin, he disembarked. For thefirst time in his life Wei laid eyes upon what was then the largest city innorth China.Dazzled and overwhelmed by Tianjin’selectric lights, tall buildings, and wide roads, Wei felt thankful that he wasnot alone. He had made the trip with a cousin who worked at a hat workshop, andhe had a safe place to stay at his uncle’s place in thecity. Wei had originally hoped to work alongside his cousin making hats, butthere were no jobs available. After a few days in the city, Wei was ready togive up and make the long journey back to his village. But his uncle happenedto work at the small Deyu Belt Factory, and he found Wei a position as anapprentice.
For his first six months on the job,Wei did not leave the confines of the belt workshop. He worked and slept in thesame space, often rising as early as four in the morning and working untilalmost midnight. As an apprentice, he earned 100 kilograms of millet per month,half of what regular workers did, and payday only came once a year. Like mostworkers in Tianjinin the early 1950s, Wei was part of what Kenneth Lieberthal calls the “traditionalsector” ofthe urban economy, small enterprises characterized by native place ties andrelatively cut off from urban society.[sup]51)[/sup]
Conditions were difficult, but Weiconsidered himself lucky. He had the family ties to get a job, and he got in atthe right time. By the mid-1950s, when urban officials began efforts to removeunwanted farmers, disaster victims, and vagrants out of the city, Wei was not atarget. He had become an acceptable urban resident, a worker in a newlynationalized, consolidated, and expanded knitting and dye factory. In 1956 hejoined the Communist Party, and his salary was enough to support his parents,his younger brother’s schooling, and his wife back in Baodi.
Wei had made the transformation fromrural to urban resident, and he felt like he had come a long way from his firstexperiences in the city. He remembered that when he first emerged from the darkindoor belt workshop in late 1951, he was still confused about how to navigatethe streets and felt afraid of city people. Wei’s boss had toldhim to take a streetcar and then transfer to something called a “turtlestreetcar”across the city to deliver some goods. On the first car, Wei noticed the peoplearound him and felt that as a rural person he was inferior to the cityresidents for whom the streetcar was old hat. “We had neverseen a car and they rode in them every day,” he said, “howcould we compare?”
After getting off for his transfer, Weisaw no mode of transportation resembling a turtle. Remembering the warnings ofhis friends in the village that Tianjin people did not stand for any nonsense,Wei found a policeman and asked where he could find the turtle streetcar (乌龟电车wūguī dianche).The policeman laughed heartily and said, “you justarrived from the village, didn’t you? It’s not a turtlecar, it’s atrackless streetcar (无轨电车 wúguǐ dianche), That’s itright there.”Having no conception of a trackless streetcar, Wei thought his boss had saidturtle (wūguī), not trackless (wúguǐ). He was embarrassed, but astime passed he learned his way around the city and became comfortableinteracting with colleagues from both city and countryside.
Wei’s position inthe city was secure, at least until the early 1960s. If Wei had arrived a fewyears later, he might have been classified as a farmer who had “blindlyflowed”into the city, a category that began to concern central leaders like Zhou Enlaiin 1953. An April 17 directive from Zhou ordered provinces and cities to stopurban enterprises from privately recruiting rural migrants. Central laborbureaus were to coordinate all hiring, and rural counties were to stop grantingofficial letters of introduction to villagers seeking city jobs.[sup]52)[/sup]The April order was largely ineffective in getting rid of villagers who hadalready used family connections to find work in Tianjin. It mandated that municipal labor,civil affairs, public safety bureaus, and unions mobilize all farmers already inthe city to return to villages―except for those still needed by theirwork units for ongoing projects. This meant that if a migrant already had ajob, he or she could stay on.
City enterprises continued to privatelyhire villagers and circumvent centralized labor planning regulations. In April1955, Tianjin’slabor bureau reported that the hiring practices of privately-operated storesand factories represented a serious loophole through which farmers could enterthe city. The bureau surveyed 1,500 small private factories and shops andidentified around 750 villagers who had been privately hired during 1954. Theproblem was that “capitalists” preferredrural employees to city workers, who were too demanding and insisted onsupervising their bosses. In September 1954, the boss at a small appliance shopdismissed all of his workers and ostensibly went out of business. According tothe labor bureau, the man “felt that worker supervision was toostrict.” Onemonth later he hired two of his relatives from the countryside and opened hisdoors again. The report noted that some shop owners “easilydischarge and exploit farmers because farmers are simple-minded.” Onefactory owner hired 28 villagers at lower wages and longer hours than theaverage worker. Another required rural migrants to pay fees before allowingthem to begin work in factories.[sup]53)[/sup]
By early 1956, all privately operatedfactories in Tianjinwere nationalized and party cadres, not capitalists, took charge of personnelmanagement.[sup]54)[/sup] But even some state-operated factories preferred tohire rural people at lower wages. As Andrew Walder has shown, the status systemof industrial workers that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s overwhelminglyfavored urban workers in large state enterprises over temporary workers fromvillages.[sup]55)[/sup] It is the contention of this paper that these statusdivisions merely institutionalized the under the table practices of the 1950s.Rural labor was cheap, exploitable labor.
In December 1954 Tianjin’srailway bureau hired 1,300 rural people, and cadres at a state operatedknitting and dye factory decided on their own to hire 31 people from a singlevillage in the Xushui area of Hebei.A good portion of the village’s leadership departed for Tianjin, includingfourteen militia members, five vice-village leaders, and five production teamleaders. It is likely that the dye factory cadres had family ties to Xushui,because it was not necessary to look so far afield for new workers. When floodrefugees entered Tianjinin 1955, it was easy for factories to find migrant workers. Tianjin’s Daming SteelMill, which had already been nationalized, bypassed the city labor bureau’sintroduction of temporary workers and went straight to small guesthouses tohire “disastervictims” ata cheaper rate. Some flood refugees were even hired on as long-term workers,including eight people who used family connections to get jobs at cottonscouring factories.[sup]56)[/sup]
As long as they stayed on the job,these new arrivals could remain in Tianjinduring the 1950s. The 1955 and 1957 efforts to remove disaster victims wereexplicitly limited to those without factory jobs. But desirable urban work wasnot available to all comers. Connections, luck, and personality all played arole in who got jobs. Liang Yangfu grew up in the same Baodi village as WeiRongchun, who was four years Liang’s senior. In 1955, Liang’sfather drove him into Tianjinon a horsecart. It was a slow, bumpy, overnight trip. Liang began what wassupposed to be a three-year apprenticeship to a family friend who was anitinerant barber. The teenager hated the work, and after a year of going fromhouse to house cutting hair, he quit and returned to his village to work thefields. He would have preferred a city factory job over agricultural work (“whowants to suffer the exhaustion [of farming]?” he asked), buthe had no idea how to find one. It seemed impossible to the seventeen-year-old.As an unpaid apprentice he was completely dependent on his master barber. Hewas afraid to approach strangers in Tianjin.“Ifelt restrained and did not know what to do,” Liangremembered, “Ieven looked down on myself.”[sup]57)[/sup]
City officials charged with removingrural people without fixed jobs were apparently unaware of his presence, butLiang gave up on Tianjinand went home on his own. Others who were fortunate enough to find stablefootholds in the city were often unwilling to leave without a fight. Many suchpeople were not workers themselves, but the family members of city employees.Family dependents made up a significantly larger portion of the 1950s increasein city population than factory workers did.[sup]58)[/sup] But it was mucheasier to deport a jobless flood refugee than to convince families to split up.Urban cadres learned this through experience.
The Tianjin municipal government’sfinal report on the 1955-1956 task of returning people to villages identifiedan excessive focus on workers’ dependents as one of the majorproblems with “returnto village”work. At first, cadres targeted women who had come to Tianjin to live with their husbands. Coupleswho did not want to live apart complained loudly. Some claimed thatmobilization work was “breaking up families” (拆散家庭 chaisan jiating). One affected workersaid, “Thesepast few years I thought the party was good, but this time around it’sreally lacking virtue” (缺德 quede). The party was supposed to limitcity population, but not at the cost of splitting up families. Urban officialsrecognized that it was counterproductive to put pressure on family members togo back to villages: “This has caused very bad effects forthe party and government among the masses.”[sup]59)[/sup] Thehands-off policy on family members continued through fall 1957. As noted above,even flood refugees who came to stay with husbands, children, and parents werenot pressured to leave the city. Only those without direct family ties weredeported. Urban officials wanted to do a good job, but they did not want to beaccused of destroying families.
Some couples already living together inTianjin foughtforced separation, but it should be noted that many families lived apart oftheir own choosing in the 1950s. Wei Rongchun got married back in his Baodivillage during his brief Chinese New Year holiday in 1952, just a few monthsafter he searched in vain for a “turtle streetcar” in Tianjin. The couple’sparents had settled on the pair’s engagement when Wei was six and hiswife was four. She was sixteen years old when she moved in with Wei’sparents. Throughout the 1950s, Wei and his wife never even considered thepossibility that she would join him permanently in the city. She was too busyin the village learning to cook, caring for her in-laws, toting heavy bucketsof water from a distant well, and planting the fields. After Wei joined theparty and began doing managerial work in 1956, she visited him briefly in Tianjin. She was happywith the salary he was making (up to 40 yuan a month), but never once imaginedthat she could shirk her many responsibilities back at home.
In one Tianjin neighborhood in 1954, most outsiderswere temporary visitors like Wei’s wife. A police station in the Fazhengbridge (法正桥) area, whereabout 20,000 people lived, analyzed every visitor who registered at the stationduring three months in 1954. Ninety percent of the 1,228 visitors came fromvillages; 398 registered as long-term residents and 830 as temporary residents.Of this total inflow, 589 people, 83 percent of them women and children, camefor short-term family visits. Another 189 outsiders, again overwhelmingly womenand children, registered as long-term residents and moved in with husbands,sons, and fathers.[sup]60)[/sup] A few people made the move for good, but manymore could only justify being away from village tasks for a few weeks or monthsat a time.
Family separation may not have beenideal, but during the 1950s rural people were willing to accept an arrangementthat allowed them to support multiple family members in the village. In April1957, Tianjinofficials offered rural people living in homemade shacks a deal that wouldprovide them with city work. There was a catch, though. Men of working age wereoffered temporary jobs as unskilled construction laborers, on the condition thatthey dismantle their shacks and agree that their wives and children return tovillages. In Nankai district, where the lean-tos were most concentrated, ittook refugees a while to warm up to the plan. Some shack dwellers did notbelieve the offer was genuine and accused the government of playing tricks. Aswe have seen, this was a legitimate suspicion, given that several months latercity cadres would falsely promise work to beggars who were really on their wayto a detention center. Other workers wondered just how temporary the job wouldbe. At the same time, a work bulletin noted, “some familymembers, especially women, were reluctant to leave city life and were unwillingto return to villages. Some individual couples and fathers and children werenot willing to separate.” To counter these misgivings, Nankaidistrict officials called a meeting featuring two former shack residents whowere already working at construction sites. After three days 88 people signedup for construction work, and 67 qualified after passing an examination(probably to check prospective workers’ health, but perhaps also toinvestigate their official class backgrounds for potential problems).[sup]61)[/sup]
By the time the city office to removefarmers and disaster victims was disbanded in September 1957, there were stillseveral hundred shacks standing in Tianjin.And even though not everyone who had dismantled their homes had left the city,pressure on them to depart had eased. Urban officials assigned to “returnto village”work probably felt relieved as they wrote up final reports and returned totheir original units. But the respite was brief. In late September Zhou Enlaiexhorted city workers to keep their family members in villages and to send backthose who were already in cities.[sup]62)[/sup] Just a few months later, partycenter issued a new order prohibiting rural people from leaving villages. Thistime the main targets for removal from cities included the family members ofcadres.[sup]63)[/sup]
At the end of 1957, several days afterthe central order was released, the Tianjincity government established a new temporary office to handle the task. Its namewas only slightly different from the one that had just wrapped up work in thefall: the Tianjin Municipal Office to Mobilize Rural Population to Return toVillages and Produce. This office’s work was less systematic andwidespread than its predecessor’s, perhaps because the campaign touchedupon the direct family interests of cadres themselves. They were already onedge because of the ongoing party rectification movement that followed on theheels of the Anti-Rightist Campaign.
In Tianjin’s Tanggu portdistrict, family members of eighteen cadres were targeted to return tovillages. Five of the officials agreed to send their family members home, butthe rest declined. A few said that wives did not get along with mothers-in-lawback in the village. Several others said that their wives could leave, but themen were unwilling to cancel the women’s household registration permitsand to relinquish housing and furniture provided to workers with spouses.[sup]64)[/sup]For some, the physical presence of a spouse was less important than thebenefits they brought along. The cadres who refused to give up apartments andfurniture probably assumed that their wives could quietly return after a monthor two. Their guess was correct, for a few months later the Great Leap Forwardwould interrupt the short-lived early 1958 effort to send family members tovillages.
Internal work bulletins reported thatwomen had their own misgivings about leaving. Wives feared that people in thevillage might say nasty things and would assume that their husbands did notwant them anymore. They expressed anxiety that time away from their husbandsmight cause connubial feelings to weaken. What if their husbands stoppedsending money home, or even worse, what if they found new lovers and asked fora divorce?
Enthusiasm for returning home waslimited. So was time. By spring 1958, the Great Leap Forward had begun. InJanuary 1958 the National People’s Congress had adopted stricterhousehold registration regulations, but the rules were ignored. A massive driveto industrialize was on, and factories openly recruited millions of ruralworkers. Jobs were available for practically anyone who wanted one. Unemployedfamily members also found paid work as newly established urban communes openedneighborhood cafeterias and nurseries. In a sense, the unfettered movement ofthe Great Leap Forward tested the validity of deporting marginal village peoplein 1955 and 1957. If the leap really led to utopia, mobility controls would beobsolete. The leap promised boundless riches in both village and city. Onceparadise was nigh, there would be no need for villagers to seek urban work. Butthe leap’stragic failure ended up affirming earlier efforts to keep rural people out ofthe city. The post-leap famine and economic crisis led to a much larger “returnto village”program that would target established workers like Wei Rongchun. As it turnedout, Wei’sfactory’sloss was his village’s gain.
Ⅲ.Conclusion Throughout the 1950s, hundreds ofthousands of villagers entered Tianjinto seek jobs, reunite with husbands, or to get through devastating floods andgrain shortages. Viewing the 1950s as a series of political movements―resistingAmerica and aiding Korea, suppressing counterrevolutionaries, thethree and five antis, and the anti-rightist campaign―obscures thedaily lives of people in and around Tianjin.Work, family, and survival were the main factors behind rural to urban migration,and politics only occasionally intruded.
While official class backgroundssometimes made a difference in everyday life (for example, in deciding whetheror not to forcibly demolish a refugee’s shack), income and familyconnections were more important. More than any other factor, material classconditions, and not the labels assigned by the party during land reform, shapedlife chances during the 1950s. Not surprisingly, rural people, vulnerable tofloods and lacking guaranteed incomes and benefits, were at the bottom of thishierarchy.
Since the eighteenth century urbanindustrial development has both drawn upon and exploited rural dwellersworldwide. Chinain the 1950s was no exception to this trend. The leaders of the People’s Republicunderstood that the labor of rural people was more easily exploitable ifvillagers’movement could be restricted and controlled, but this was more easily said thandone during the decade following 1949. It would take the tragedy of the GreatLeap famine to finally justify and institutionalize the rural urban divide.After 1961, labor mobility―and the socialist planned economy as awhole―wouldbecome a bit more planned. Even so, movement between city and countrysidecontinued. |
发表于 2012-11-29 01:20:31