Stephen Andors: The Dynamics of Mass Campaigns in Chinese Industry

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The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 8:4

The Dynamics of Mass Campaigns in Chinese Industry: Initiators, Leaders, and Participants in the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius

By Stephen Andors

The mass campaigns and social upheavals that periodically characterize Chinese politics are much more than the way in which Mao Ze-dong and his radical allies in the national leadership have used the masses to wage factional war against supposedly "moderate" or "pragmatic" bureaucrats and technocrats. Nor are the motives of those who lead and participate in these campaigns at the grass roots universally or even significantly characterized by the selfish lust for power and privilege or by a mindless irrational fervor, or by a superficial and coerced conformity, though there are obviously elements of such behavior in these complex and fascinating events. Though undoubtedly initiated by national leaders who attempt to manipulate and shape the outcomes of the campaigns (after all, who else but national or provincial level leaders could formally initiate a mass campaign on a national or provincial scale, and who else controlled the available media which publicized and gave impetus to far-reaching mass mobilization?), mass campaigns in China rally people around real and vitally important issues of universal political concern.
For people living outside of China, especially those who take the values and institutions of capitalist civilization 1 as universal norms or the inevitable results of "modern society," or even as the regrettable-best-that-can-be-hoped-for given the weaknesses of "human nature," it is sometimes difficult to believe that the rhetoric of equality and selflessness that is so much a part of the campaigns in China is anything more than the visions of a minority bent on forcing people into a revolutionary mold that flies in the face of people's "real" interests and aspirations. The thought of mass politics defined by something beyond the struggle for money, possessions, or personal power and privilege seems so foreign or so threatening to the social and moral order of the dominant way of life that it is either ridiculed, dismissed, or ignored. Indeed, one can almost detect a note of gleeful relief in journalistic reports that these things still motivate some people to action in China in spite of all revolutionary rhetoric and exhortation to the contrary. 2
There is little or nothing in contemporary Western society which could allow for or be analogous to a "mass campaign" as Chinese Marxists understand this phenomenon. There are, of course, grass-roots political movements of one kind or another, but thus far at least, few if any have questioned the unequal class structure or the elitist philosophical premises upon which the dominant institutions of education and work are built and which reproduce and' reinforce the overall social division of labor. 3 There is no process by which the purpose and rationale of individual activity can be consciously related to collective human life. Yet it is precisely the focus on class inequality and the public confrontation with the implications of individual motivation that give the campaigns in China their identity in contrast to grass-roots politics in the West. The substance of the campaigns, the concrete problems that they deal with, and the dynamics of initiation, leadership, and participation must all be understood in this light.
This essay deals specifically with three major campaigns in Chinese industrial enterprises. the Great Leap Forward of 1958-60; the Cultural Revolution of 1966-69; and the Campaign to Criticise Lin Biao and Confucius or Pi-Lin Pi-Gong of 1973-75 which then turned into a closely related campaign to Study Marxism and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat which is really still going on today, 1976. Technically, these were not single-issue movements and they included far more of Chinese society than the industrial enterprises and even the whole industrial system. All of them aimed at political, social and economic transformations in general. Ideological issues were debated alongside enormous upheaval in schools and the educational system, and everything from hospital administrations to family life was affected in one way or another. The campaigns in industry, therefore, must be evaluated and understood as part of the social ferment that accompanied the campaigns in general.
The complexities of these campaigns, and the interrelationships they embodied, combined with a lack of information on certain crucial matters, especially on the substance and pattern of communication within the Chinese Communist Party, 4 make this study more a preliminary than a definitive answer to the basic questions of leadership, participation, and interest definition and articulation in China. Nevertheless, the campaigns in industry do speak directly to these fundamental and important problems of political theory, and focus on problems of power and community within amajor institution of technologically advanced civilization. The issues, therefore, are important ones both inside and outside the field of Chinese studies.
The Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward in Chinese industrial enterprises began, in a superficial sense, with a May 1957 directive from the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party communicated to all Party organizations at all levels, including the enterprise-level party committees. This directive was itself part of the 1957 Rectification Campaign, and it stressed that all cadres, party and non-party, were to make arrangements to participate in collective manual labor. 5 Nearly one year later, in late April 1958, a Party Committee Secretary of the Heilongjiang Provincial Party Committee made an important speech to a group of industrial leaders in the province. In the speech he noted that there were five factories in Heilongjiang which, for the past year or so, had developed a new and revolutionary system of factory management which involved worker participation in management, cadre participation in labor, and the reform of organizational rules and regulations (called, in the verbal shorthand of the time, "two participations and one reform"). The national press had given great publicity to these five factories only the day before. 6 Thus, the mass campaign to learn from the experiences of these five model factories which became the essence of the Great Leap's approach to enterprise management began in April 1958 clearly on the initiative of the center, but with an undisclosed amount of pressure from local or provincial authority. By the end of 1959, a Great Leap "constitution for industry" had been formulated based on the Heilongjiang models, and literally tens of thousands of industrial and mining enterprises had experimented with various types and degrees of this "two participations and one reform" system. Moreover, another system specifically for technical management and control work in innovation and designing had been formulated and given the name "triple combination." 7
The speed with which the "two participations, one reform, and triple combination" system spread through China's industrial system, and the incredible complexity, earnestness, and unevenness of the experiments triggered off by attempts to adapt it to local conditions suggests that more was involved than a mechanical adherence to a Party central directive. 8 In fact, in attacking one-man development, the policies of the Leap found crucial sources of support within Chinese industry, both from amongst the leading cadres at the enterprise level as well as some economic planners. This was a very heterogeneous group made up of people who, whatever their major potential sources of disagreement, were united on their general unhappiness with the Soviet one-man management system. This group of enterprise leaders had their ideas and opinions shaped by the rapid change that had marked Chinese society ever since 1949.
As the transformation of the privately owned sector of the Chinese industrial economy began to pick up speed in 1954 and 1955, it soon became clear that the many small and scattered shops and factories in the cities would have to be amalgamated, their operations unified, and their structure rationalized. Quite frequently, this involved physical relocation of people and equipment, and a merging together of technical and managerial manower from different plants into one new factory organization. 9
To impose over this kind of conflict and heterogeneity the tightly hierarchical and basically non-collegial atmosphere inherent in the bureaucratic one-man management system was to ask for political and economic trouble. Since this process of amalgamation was a widespread and significant aspect of industrial evolution in urban China in the mid-1950s, it created very unfavorable conditions within the former capitalist sector of China's industry for the implementation of one-man management.
Secondly, many Chinese capitalists and bourgeois technical personnel were still influenced by traditional Confucian notions of authority, obedience, and discipline as flowing from internal moral constraints rather than from external, rule-bound ones. 10 While they certainly would not be happy supporters of worker prerogatives which challenged their elite status during the Leap, neither were they at all comfortable with the authority patterns and decision-making processes implied by one-man management. 11
Thirdly, the one-man management system required the capacity to generate and predict "hard" input and output quotas and norms. Given technical conditions (old, broken down, or unreliable machinery) and in some cases, an inexperienced and unskilled labor force, combined with very uneven technical developments in different parts of the country as well as within enterprises, or within different enterprises within the same industry, it became difficult to gather accurate information or to rely on the general applicability of the data that were collected even if accurate. 12 And without such data, planning and production within the factory could be held back rather than promoted by the system, while planning and coordination at the central, regional, and provincial ministry levels would be severely hampered. 13
Some of the technicians, engineers, and designers of industrial buildings and machinery were trained in the United States or other countries of the Western capitalist world, and were simply anti-Soviet, if not overtly anti-communist in their political sympathies. Others were simply wedded to American or British ways of doing things rather than the Soviet way. 14 The plants where Soviet influence and aid was very extensive were also key development projects in the first five-year plan; as such they naturally attracted skilled workers and technicians from all over the country, but especially from Shanghai. 15 But from wherever they came, skilled Chinese workers and technicians were often quite proud, and did not always enjoy working under Soviet experts or following their suggestions. 16
The one-man management system, when imposed over or implemented alongside the older "Shanghai system" 17 where party committees and trade union committees had wielded such enormous power, very quickly generated what could become very vicious conflict. Party committee secretaries and plant managers, both of whom were party members, competed with each other for the honors, rewards, and promotions that came with the responsibility for meeting or exceeding the targets of their factories. They also argued over who had power over which kinds of decisions, and in the process of fighting with each other, did not hesitate to use their influence and position to enlist others in the factory on one side or another. The result could be chaos. 18
The Soviet system put great emphasis on the utilization of technical and administrative skills that were most likely to be found among the engineers and technicians who graduated from technical schools and universities, many of whom were of bourgeois origin. Even newly promoted and educated workers were subject to the behavioral imperatives implied by the whole system of organization, control, and incentives. Many cadres rebelled against a system which was clearly threatening their own authority and status, but they also felt sure that such developments were a threat to the cooperative, egalitarian ideals of the revolution and socialism. 19
It is easy to over-emphasize the problems of one-man management and ignore the all too obvious fact that the period of the first five-year plan saw a rapid and very impressive rise in Chinese industrial output and capacity. But it must also be remembered that Soviet management and planning practices were one part of the general Soviet approach to economic development that the Chinese were also following. This approach itself, as well as that part of it concerned with management and planning, had contributed to other tensions and problems in Chinese society that by 1957, on the eve of the Great Leap, were becoming increasingly serious and obvious.
The stress on heavy industry, the tendency to stress urban as opposed to rural development, the quest for large-scale, narrowly defined cost criteria for investment at the expense of investment in developing the marginal or the local, all of these aspects of the Soviet development strategy had brought China's agricultural production to the point where it had become an important constraint on further modernization and economic development. Since the development strategy and the planning process and the management system were all related, the Chinese faced some very hard choices on the eve of the Leap, in spite of the impressive gains in industry and important changes in rural life and agricultural production.
Thus, the direct initiation for the Leap came from the Party Central Committee, but indirectly it flowed from the Party's ability to command a political coalition which, in tile formative historical stages of the Leap, was made up of a wide array of people in leadership positions within factories and even within the planning apparatus. Not all of these people, it should be stressed, understood the implications of collective Party leadership, nor thought it would eventually challenge their own privilege and prerogatives vis-à-vis workers as later occurred during the Leap. This coalition was based more on its opposition to one-man management than it was on its support of any other single alternative, and it provided the crucial leadership in fighting one-man management even while such an approach was official policy of the central authorities.
The leadership for the process that aimed at breaking the influence of one-man management of course is not the same as the leadership for the later, and far more revolutionary, goals of the Great Leap Forward, goals which postulated radical departures in the division of labor and power in industrial enterprises. In fact, in contrast to the situation before the Cultural Revolution, there is very little information on just how the experiments of the Leap began in individual factories. There are, however, some very clear indications of who the leaders were who took up the Party's initiative.
In most cases, local, grass-roots party organization and individuals were very important, and they found strong support from activist workers who wanted more say in the running of their factories than what was allowed or practicable with workers' representative congresses alone. 20 There seemed to be a good deal of worker antipathy toward the middle-level staff managers who had such strong powers under the one-man management system. 21 A widespread movement for organizational reform aimed at the staff managerial bureaucracy had begun in the latter half of 1957, and was accompanied by increasing cadre participation in labor, more autonomy for workers in controlling production, and a general de-emphasis on the role of functional departments in managing or checking on workers. 22 Neither the tempo nor the depth of these changes were under the control of high level party authorities. Since the atteript to have cadres participate in labor implied radical changes in the organizational structure and division of labor within factories, pressure to experiment accordingly could have come from any number of sources within a plant. 23 So too could opposition. 24
Leadership, however, was only part of the dynamic of the Great Leap Forward. Literally millions of people participated in the programs that were directly related to the Leap. These included widespread efforts to train workers to take on administrative responsibilities and the incredible upsurge in various forms of mass education aimed at improving workers' technical skills. 25 There was, in addition, a great effort made to improve the technical skills of administrative cadres, many of whom were members of the Communist Party, and to transform the elitist values of the bourgeois engineers and technicians. 26
The mass education program alone directly meant that many workers were to be rapidly promoted and given new power and responsibilities. Massive programs at all levels of industrial society began, with over 20 million people all over the country attending spare time courses by 1960. 27 In industrial enterprises, spare-time schools were set up to train workers in technical matters to facilitate worker participation in management. 28 Technical research institutes, colleges, and middle schools were all included, as were basic literacy and arithmetic classes.29 29 Vocational education aimed at broadening the number of skills each worker could handle in order to release workers in rotation for participation in management. 30 All of the work-study programs of the Leap were specifically designed to absorb a large number of workers into management roles at all levels, 31 including upper-level managerial and engineering positions. 32 But the greatest impact of the Leap was on the middle levels of management and on the workers who occupied those positions or who were promoted into them.
The program of training management personnel at all levels from amongst people of working-class background had begun in earnest in 1956. 33 It began to affect middle- and basic-level production leaders almost at once, many of whom really needed the increased training. 34 When this program accelerated greatly during the Leap, it meant that a large number of workers were to become important middle-level managers and production leaders, 35 and they were to represent in their habits and values an important alternative to the bourgeois technicians and engineers who had formerly been so powerful.
The educational policies and management methods that were developed in the industrial system during the Leap, therefore, were to create a large group of factory workers whose experiences and new responsibilities would be a crucial aspect of grass-roots political leadership in later years. Initiative and early leadership for the Leap had involved a ragged alliance of various factory level cadres with a relatively small group of militant and class-conscious workers who enjoyed at least the public support of the powerful Communist Party and the national media. But the very process of Great Leap experimentation in production and education was to create a whole new, and potentially much larger, group of leaders for the next major campaign in industry which was to come some six years later. Even the Leap's attack on material incentives found significant grass-roots support and spread rapidly, for the crux of policy here was aimed more at the high salaries and bonuses of cadres than at workers who clearly had good reason to oppose piece-work rates and control systems they embodied. 36
The Cultural Revolution
There is no question, as we shall see shortly, that the workers, technicians, engineers, and administrative leaders who looked positively on their experiences during the Leap played an absolutely central role in leading the rebellions that shook China's factories during the Cultural Revolution. There was, however, an important difference and in terms of leadership, a crucial discontinuity. The enterprise level Party Committees which had been so central in leading the Leap Forward in its early stages were by 1966 in a much more ambiguous situation. This was primarily because of their strong ties and loyalties to municipal and provincial level planning and coordinative authorities, and because the problems of planning and economic coordination were themselves the focus of intense political disagreement at the highest levels of political life in China during the years 1961-1964. 37 Neither initiation nor leadership for the Cultural Revolution in Chinese factories can be found by focusing on the Party as an organization, though individual Party members were very important initiators at the highest levels, and some were leaders at the grass-roots level as well. In spite of the fact that the Cultural Revolution formally began with a "Sixteen-Point Declaration" of the Party Central Committee on August 8, 1966, this upheaval, even more than the Great Leap, was not the result of a decision. Forces were at work in Chinese society which could no longer be contained and which threatened to erupt at any time with potentially enormous political consequences. In fact, the Cultural Revolution had already begun even before the national media indicated that it was to be a formal policy of the Party and thus gave impetus to a rapidly spreading mass campaign. 38
Technical decision-making and control procedures, a major focus of upheaval during the Great Leap, were an early and obvious source of serious disagreements within the ranks of technical and engineering personnel in the Cultural Revolution. 39 In addition, there were early signs that conflict paralleled organizational levels and functions in the factories, including but by no means limited to conflict between workers in general and certain managers in general. These kinds of conflicts seemed to be much more significant than party versus non-party conflict between or among individuals because the day-to-day experience of most party members came as workers or functionaries at different levels and types of work in the enterprise. Indeed, many party members at the basic level leadership positions were not on the Party Committee which was the highest level of authority in any enterprise regardless of size or function. 40
All of this meant that the "power seizures" which hit China's industrial enterprises in the Winter of 1967 would find factory level management, party and non-party, technical and administrative, distinguishable in two ways: according to organizational level; or according to their attitude about the proper and rational procedures to be followed in their work. Moreover, these divisions were by no means congruent to one another. Leaders for the later stages of the Cultural Revolution, therefore, could be found from both groups as were those who opposed the Cultural Revolution. At first, however, this was not clear to the early leaders of the "January Revolution" which began in Shanghai.
In January 1967 the Cultural Revolution in industrial enterprises erupted openly with power seizures by rebel groups against the authorities in each enterprise. 41
The people who came under attack were not at first clearly defined. Most of them exercised some form of administrative or organizational authority, but they were not necessarily leaders in the personal sense. 42 Thus, in the beginning, not all cadres came under attack, but only cadres were among those attacked. In general, those who bore the brunt of early rebel criticism were usually administrative and technical managers at the factory and the workshop levels, but many technical and administrative cadres continued to work and were not attacked. 43
These early attempts by rebel workers to take power from entrenched factory managers ("power seizures"), therefore, were aimed largely at factory level management and the middle level control apparatus at the workshop level which was the extension of factory managerial authority. But these power seizures had been preceded, in some cases, by almost a year or more of struggle and debate between workers and management, both Party and non-Parry ("power struggles"). 44 Most of the early rebel leaders clearly seemed to come from workers and cadres of various ranks and positions directly involved in full-time production who were also active critics of the factory leaders during the socialist education campaign and who had come to the fore as a result of change during the Great Leap. 45 In following stages of the cultural revolution, outside leadership became more important, but by 1968, the internal leadership broadened and became central once again.
What outside leadership did exist in the early stages, aside from work teams sent by higher party or government authorities who usually acted to restore order rather than promote criticism or rebellion, were the Red Guards and the People's Liberatibn Army (PLA). PLA influence did not really become important until March 1967, 46 while the role of Red Guards began in October 1966, but was limited to helping worker rebels articulate their grievances. 47 Indeed, in at least some cases, rebel workers were extremely hostile to all forms of outside intervention. 48
Although many of the early rebel leaders were, therefore, clearly full-time regular workers and cadres, a significant number of workers in some Chinese enterprises were so-called "contract workers" (he-tong-gong) or "auxiliary workers." 49 Since these people were discriminated against and not given the welfare, medical, or salary benefits of regular workers, they offered a logical base of support, and perhaps even of leadership in some cases for rebel workers. Moreover, when compared to the role of "model workers," the contract and auxiliary workers clearly played a more active role in some early rebellions, but temporary and contract labor, while an issue in the cultural revolution rebellions in factories, was not central to them. 50
It is clear that many people were at first ambivalent or even hostile to the rebels, for they were either unwilling to challenge what they knew to be the powerful authority of the Communist Party and the factory's management, or unable to dissociate themselves from the Party's leadership which had, after all, brought enormous improvement in their own lives. 51 Very often, model workers or "five-good" workers were caught in precisely this kind of predicament, and since these people were often informal, if not formal leaders, their support for the rebels became all the more crucial. 52
It is also obvious that many workers participated in the rebellions in the clear expectation that a power seizure would lead to increases in wages, promotion to a higher salary grade, or added bonuses. 53 This was obviously the reason for the success at first of the "economist" strategy used by factory managers and Party Committee Secretaries to buy off the rebels, but as an issue in rebel motivation, it seemed to be less characteristic of rebel leaders, who were interested in power and in ideological issues, than it was of early participants in the rebellions. 54
But even many participants were concerned less with the matter of money, and more with the problem of relative distribution, including such matters as privileges both on and off the job, and relative power in the course of daily work.
A significant number of rebel leaders were cadres, i.e., people with some technical or administrative power in the formal or organizational sense. These cadres could come from any social or family background, but most of them were from working class families who had attended work-study schools or specialized vocational-technical schools rather than full-time colleges or universities. 55 Many of the cadres, or "workertechnicians" who led the rebellion against pompous and privilege-loving managers and technicians, whom they called "bourgeois authorities," were also workers who had been promoted to engineer or technician status at the workshop or even factory levels of management during the Great Leap, and then, during the post-Leap period, were discriminated against or demoted. 56 Even if these people were not active leaders in the beginning, they were regarded as reliable allies against the technical or engineering personnel who were criticized as bourgeois authorities and who almost all had come from the full-time colleges or universities where the majority of students were from families that could easily be classified as bourgeois prior to 1949. 57
The period after March 1967 saw the Cultural Revolution begin to spread to factories and mines which had not experienced any formal power seizures but which nevertheless contained the same kinds of cleavages between workers and management, among cadres, and among workers which had generated power seizures elsewhere. By March, factionalism seemed to be spreading. 58 It was based not only on confusion over what the issues were, but also on the fact that the authority of the Communist Party was no longer the basis for unified leadership. In this situation, the PLA stepped in to play several crucial roles.
First of all, the Army gave rebels within enterprises an alternative source of macro-level authority and legitimacy at the crucial municipal and provincial levels of government and party organization. 59 It became a source of administrative coherence and legitimacy in a context of ideological turmoil. 60
Secondly, the army served as a political broker between rival factions within industrial enterprises. It was extremely important in the process by which cadres at middle and upper levels were brought back into administrative and productive activities through the formation of "revolutionary great alliances" between workers, cadres, and PLA or militia representatives. 61
Thirdly, the PLA acted as an instrument of political propaganda and education. It tried to clarify issues concerning authority, incentives, and leadership, and attempted to relate these issues to specific individuals or groups so that judgments could be made about the "revolutionary qualities" of any person being considered for a position of leadership. 62 In addition, the PLA representatives often took part in organizational reform so that the Cultural Revolution would not become a simple or meaningless purge. 63
Finally, the PLA often helped in production especially in factories where factionalism or attacks on cadres were so severe as to threaten to paralyze operations and coordination altogether. 64
Factionalism, but not necessarily confusion, was generally ended by the end of 1967 with the formation of what were called "revolutionary great alliances" usually made up of workers, technicians or cadres, and representatives from the Army. If there was no PLA representative in the plant, then the third group represented in the alliance would be the militia or a mass organization. The initiation for the formation of these alliances, which were then to oversee the process of forming revolutionary committees for individual factories and mines, seems to have come directly from Mao in early 1967. 65 Leadership was provided by some Party members, PLA soldiers, and newly emerging worker activists. 66 The pace of this process of forming alliances and electing revolutionary committees clearly indicates local leadership in carrying out this "instruction." 67
Even as these alliances were being formed, and the issues of the cultural revolution clarified in the course of two mass campaigns aimed at the so-called "Seventy Articles" and the "Trust" system of planning and coordination, the question of leadership and participation was becoming more complex. By mid 1968, participation in the cultural revolution had increased enormously, and with it the complexity of issues and the motives of leaders. Not only did people rebel against or criticize specific attitudes and methods of decision-making, but the conflicts between people from different educational backgrounds, generations, and post-1949 experiences were all exacerbated by personal feuds and pre-1949 histories which had been uncovered in the course of the great debates that characterized daily life. 68 yet, in all of these currents, there was a constant thread which pointed to the importance of the Great Leap Forward in creating leaders, and providing the rationale for participation in as well as opposition to the Cultural Revolution. In factories, where the issue of technical knowledge was so central to production and politics, the educational and organizational reforms of the Leap were particularly important in providing a base upon which to project criticisms of substance, not just power.
The Campaign to Criticize Lin Piao and Confucius
The campaign to criticize Lin Piao and Confucius, and the very closely related campaign to study Marxism and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat began openly in the autumn of 1973. Though Lin and Confucius were not linked together until the winter of 1974, the themes of the campaign were visible clearly before then.
The Pi-Lin Pi-Gong campaign was clearly and closely linked to the issues raised by the Cultural Revolution, and so too was the leadership for it. Criticism of Confucius was nothing new in China, but in the post Cultural Revolution period, it began again in August 1971 with an article in the national Ren Min Ri Bao (Peoples' Daily) which dealt with Confucian ideas on education and was written by the Writing Group of the Shantung Provincial Party Committee. 69 Open criticism of Lin Piao appeared quite clearly on the initiative of the Party Central Committee, and had been going on since at least September 1973, but obviously had been going on within the Party well before that. The actual linking of Confucius and Lin began in December, 1974 when the Workers' Commentary Group of the Tientsin Battery Cable Plant wrote "Link the Criticism of Confucius with the Criticism of Lin Piao" 70 followed up by a major essay in Hong Qi on the same subject two months later. 71
It is not possible, given available information, to know who or what group suggested this topic for the Workers' Commentary Group of the Tientsin Battery Cable Plant, but there is overwhelmingly strong circumstantial evidence to point to the Party organization acting on central initiative. Unlike the Cultural Revolution, the Pi-Lin Pi-Gong Campaign as it unfolded was initiated by the Communist Party as an organization and not by an alliance of some CP members with revolutionary elements within Chinese society. It is also clear, however, that this initiative from the Party found strong support from elements within China that had been products of the Cultural Revolution and who, in fact, had been leading figures in attempts within factories to prevent the negation of Cultural Revolution reforms.
So momentous were the possibilities presented by the ideological and organizational issues posed by the Cultural Revolution, that intense debate and experimentation had continued in China well after the Ninth Party Congress had signalled its official end. In the post Cultural Revolution period, the frequently intense political violence of the previous three or four years was transformed into no less intense intellectual debate and organizational experimentation. Concrete measures to broaden and institutionalize worker participation in management and cadre participation in labor quickly led to disagreements and arguments about the nature and degree of control and inequality that was required in industrial enterprises. As a result of the Great Leap, then of the Cultural Revolution, people now argued more articulately and more openly about the nature and sources of knowledge of science and technology, and they linked this epistemological question to the political question of which class-the workers or the bourgeois technical authorities — would wield power.
It was clear that the worker activists who had emerged during the Cultural Revolution were not all happy with the organizational results of actual production operations and factory management practices as these had evolved in some factories since the Cultural Revolution. They used their increasingly sophisticated grasp of theoretical Marxism and their increased technical knowledge and administrative experience to make telling and specific criticisms of the factories which were under the very same Communist Party leadership which was organizing and leading the Pi-Lin Pi Gong campaign. 72 Even before the Pi-Lin Pi-Gong campaign became a national movement, these criticisms could become quite militant in opposing certain kinds of incentives which led to uneven distribution of money or work assignments, 73 in opposing their exclusion from technical decision-making or designing work, 74 in insisting on the. right to be consulted in the planning of factory output, 75 or in opposing harsh working conditions, poor sanitary and eating facilities, and cadre privileges. 76
As the Pi-Lin Pi-Gong campaign merged into the campaign to Study Marxism and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, a group of non-Party "worker-theorists" began to emerge in many factories. Composed of probably no more than 7% of all the workers in a given factory, 77 and working closely with the Party, and in some cases overlapping with its membership, these worker theorists organized study classes in Marxism for other workers and were sometimes assisted by students in philosophy and law from the various universities.
The continued and growing involvement of Chinese workers in what were sometimes highly complex technological processes in production and designing 78 was now being supplemented by a group of workers who were studying and attempting to understand the political theories and philosophy embodied in Marxism. The difficulty of both the technicalscientific and the political-philosophical subject matter does not make it highly likely that institutionalized non-Party leadership for mass campaigns will spread with extreme rapidity. But the very act of participation is itself an act of study and, as it did in previous campaigns, it creates a larger and growing group of sophisticated basic level activists within China's highly politicized society. Since this leadership group only partially overlaps the membership of the powerful Communist Party organization, and even less completely overlaps factory management, these workers could, at certain critical points, be an alternative source of ideological and political power within Chinese factories, but one not necessarily in permanent or complete opposition to the CCP.
Conclusion
Each of these campaigns was built on the one that went before it and had deep roots in the day-to-day realities faced by the Chinese working class. The Great Leap depended for its early leadership on the Communist Party and a relatively small number of workers who resented not only the personal implications of bureaucratic-technocratic management, but who had a tradition of pride in their own skills and practical knowledge as well as the models presented by former workers who had become part of management in the hectic years immediately following liberation in 1948-49. Moreover, in its opposition to the Soviet inspired one-man management system, the Leap gained at least the passive acquiescence in its formative stages of a fairly broad alliance of powerful non-Party factory-level management, economic planners, and party members.
Yet the Leap itself changed all this. Even while it created hundreds of thousands of new activists and leaders whose experiences in work, management, and education were to leave them with the confidence, the will, and the knowledge to seek and to wield power, it fractured the Party and, at least temporarily, changed its role in leading the Chinese revolution. The Cultural Revolution would not have taken the form it did, nor indeed could it have even occurred without the Leap.
In defining the conflict between bureaucratictechnocratic management versus the mass management of the Leap as vital political issue involving the very nature of knowledge, power, and purpose in society, the Cultural Revolution initiators received ready support from literally hundreds of thousands of workers and students who not only could readily agree with this definition of reality but had on their own begun to act on it in scattered instances. Like the Leap, the Cultural Revolution created still more new and experienced leaders as well as a larger number of participants. People's experiences and understanding of recent events imade it even more difficult to impose bureaucratictechnocratic controls within factories after the Cultural.
Revolution than it had been after the Leap, and for a short time after the Cultural Revolution it was in some Places difficult to implement any kind of discipline it all. 79 Certainly, the opposition to bureaucratic-technocratic management was much more open, immediate, articulate, and widespread after the Cultural Revolution than after the Leap Forward. 80.
The Pi-Lin. Pi-Gong Campaign defined the substance of issqes as these had emerged from the Cultural Revolution. It drew its leadership largely from those whose experience during the Cultural Revolution was positive or traumatic enough to challenge formerly unquestioned or persistent assumptions about knowledge, power, and purpose. Again, as during the Cultural Revolution, leadership for this more systematic campaign was not confined to the Party even though the Party played a more central organizing role in it.
All of the mass campaigns, once initiated, generated a momentum that quickly transcends the more immediate but no less real and important aspects of elite power struggle that so clearly marked the Cultural Revolution and the Pi-Lin Pi-Gong Campaign. Once begun, the dynamic of the campaigns could not be controlled by any elite, and each campaign left a different China from the one that existed at the campaigns' onset. In each of 'these campaigns, there was a mass learning process going on, technical as well as political. The number of leaders active in Chinese politics increased, as did the ideological and theoretical sophistication of the participants and the way in which issugs were presented and understood. In all of the campaigns in industry, the distribution and purpose of technical knowledge was a prime issue of political concern and conflict. In all these campaigns, increasing mass technical sophistication facilitated increasing mass political participation, and increasing mass political participation demanded increasing mass technical sophistication. As both technical sophistication and political participation proceeded in the course of one campaign the level of sophistication and thoroughness in which the matter of technical knowledge. was debated politically during the next campaign increased noticeably.
Yet, there is still quite a way to go before the manipulative dangers which art associated with mass politics in the West no longer exist in China. In a very important sense, mass politics in China remains crucially dependent, though not completely so, on initiation from. the center. It has been the center which defines the issues and chooses examples or models that become part of and the basis for mass national debate, discussion, and. experimentation; and it is the center which, through the natibrial media, defines stages in reality that mark campaigns off from the periods which precede and follow them.
Yet, not only the center is active in choosing models. It seems that such activity is one of the major functions of provincial and municipal level planners and administrators, and to be a model has become' a major goal of enterprise level leaders, one that is not always pursued with the purest of tactics. 81 And certainly it is not the center or Chairman Mao who provides the active leadership by which the essence of the model's meaning is communicated to people involved in day production, nor is it the center which provides the mass participatory attempt to make this meaning real. It is this process which ultimately provides the energy for one campaign even while it creates the leaders for the next one.
Notes
1. For a fuller discussion of the concept of "capitalist civilization" as used here, see my forthcoming book, Socialist Civilization and Revolutionary Industrialization. China 1949 to the present (New York Pantheon, 1977 ).

2. See the article by Fox Butterfield, The Now York Times, August 23, 1976 , p. 1, for a good example of this kind of journalism.

3. For an excellent work which deals with the relationship between class inequality and the division of labor, see. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital. The Degradation of Wok in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975 ). For a brilliant work that deals with the relationship between educational systems' and elitist philosophy as well as class inequality, see Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, Scbooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976 ).

4. For a beginning of research in this area, see Michel Oksenberg ; "Methods of Communication Within the Chinese Bureaucracy", The China Quarterly, no. 57 January-March 1974 , pp. 1-39; and Kenneth Lieberthid, A Research Guide to Central Party and Government Meetings in China: 1949-1975 (White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976 ).

5. Heilungkians State operated Chinghua Machine Tools Factory Party Committee, "A Preliminary Summing Up of the Experience of Cadre Participation in Production, Worker Participation in Management, and Professional Reform" (Kuan-yü kan-pu te'an-chia sheng-ch'an, kung-jen ts'an-chia kuan-li ho yeh-wu kai-ko ching-yen ti ch'u-pu tsung-chieh), Jen-min Jib-pau (JMJP), April 25, 1958. This article refers to the May 1957 directive.

6. Ibid. The speech referred to was published in JMJP on April 26, 1958. See Wang Hao-feng, "An Important Reform in -Mangement of Industrial Enterprises", JMJP, April 26, 1958 in Survey of the China Mainland Press (SCMP), no. 1174.

7. For details on these systems, see Stephen Andols, Factory Management in China: The Politics of Modernization in a Revolutionary Society, Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1974. or Socialist Civilization, chapter 4.

8. Ibid., for details.

9. Ting Tso-cheno, "Experiences Gained in Amalgamating Plants and Converting Them into Jointly Opemted Concerns", Kung Shang Chieh (Industrial and Commercial Circles), Peking, June 10, 1955, in ECMM. no. 11.

10. See Richard Solomon, Mao's Revolution and the Chinese political Culture (Berkeley: University of California Priss, 1971 ). Solomon's description of basically upper class, elite cultural values is portrayed as universal character traits of all Chinese for all time, and is a fatal flaw in this work's conceptualization. Read with extreme care, however, it is of some value.

11. Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966 ), pp. 248-254, apes that these characteristics of the Chinese bourgeoisie were reason enough to try one-man management in order to improve the efficiency of industrial production.

12. "No. 1 Ministry of Machine Industry Determines to Regard operations Schedule as Central Task in Strengthening Planned Management" JMJP, July 28, 1953, in. SCMP no. 639.

13. Ibid. There were also other objections to one-man management even in articles which ostensibly were in support of it.

14. "Strengthen Leadership Over Designing Work", Cbieb-fang jih-pao (CFJP), Shanghai', July 8, 1954 in SCMP Supplement, no. 900.

15. See numerous NCNA reports from all over the country from 1950-53.

16. JMJP editorial, "Learn the Use of Scientific Methods in Industrial Management", JMJP, June 19, 1953, in SCMP no. 601 for clear indications of opposition to Soviet advice at Anshan's Iron and Steel Complex. See also, "The Case of the Shenyang Transformer Plant", NCNA, Peking, July 22, 1956 in SCMP no. 1344, pp. 9-16.

17. See Andors, Socialist Civilization, chapter 3, for details.

18. Ibid. For a detailed discussion of conflict that resulted when the Soviet system was superimposed over Chinese reality, see William Brugger , Democracy and Organization in the Chinese Industrial Enterprise: 1948-1953 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976 ), pp. 184-216 and passim.

19. Ezra Vogel, "The Regularization of Cadres", China Quarterly, no. 29, January-March 1967 , pp. 52-53.

20. "Workers' Representatives Talk About Workers' Representative Congresses" (Chih-kung tai-piao t'an chih-kung tai-piao ta-hui), Kung-jen jih-pao (KJJP), Peking, January 22, 1957.

21. JMJP editorial, "The Way to Gradually Promote the Convening of Workers' Representative Congresses in State Operated Enterprises", (Tsai kuo-ying ch'i-yeh chung ju-pu t'ui-kung chao-k'ai chih-kung tai-piao ta-hui ti pan-fa), JMJP, May 29, 1957. The trade union organization was responsible for convening the workers' congresses, and many probably did not wish to see the practice eliminated even for the sake of experimentation with greater worker participation in management. See an article on the Shanghai Boiler Plant which shows trade-union opposition to change, "Utilize the Workers' Representative Congress to Promote a Production Hightide" (Yün-yung chih-kung tai-piao ta-hui t'ui-tung sheng-ch'an kao-ch'ao) KJJP, February 25, 1958.

22. See the report on the Shihchingshan Iron and Steel Factory, JMJP, September 28, 1957. See also reports from Tientsin ( Tientsin Daily, October 20, 1957 and JMJP, November 13, 1957), Peking (Ta Kung Pao, October 18, 1957 and JMJP, September 28, 1957), Nanking (Ta Kung Pao, November 17, 1957), and T'aiyuan (Shansi Daily, November 6, 1957).

23. Chang Chin-yu, "Fouhsin Central Machine Repair Plant's Leading Cadres Preliminary Experience in 'Planting Experimental Fields,'" (Fou-hsin chung-yang chi-hsiu-ch'an ling-tao kan-pu kao 'shih-yen-tien' ri ch'u-pu ching-yen), Coal Industry, April 4, 1958. For more detail, see Andors, Socialist Civilization, op. cit., chapter 4, or my Ph.D. dissertation, chapter 3.

24. For details, see ibid. For one very interesting article, see "Cadres in Paint Factory Plant Experimental Fields and at First Reap Bitter Harvest" (Yu-tan-ch'an kan-pu chung-tien ch'u-t'ui hsin-shou), Sbeng-ch'an Pao, Dairen, April 14, 1958.

25. "Carry Out Education in the Mass Line for Section Leaders" (Tui kung-tuan-chang shih-hsing ch'un-chung lu-hsien chiao-yu), Liaoning Daily, November 14, 1957; "Strengthen Leadership Work in Technical Studies for Young Workers" (Chia-ch'iang tui ch'ing-kung chi-shu hsueh-hsi ti ling-tao), Chinese Youth (Chung-kuo Ch'ing-nien), January 23, 1958. Numerous other articles appeared at about this time on these themes.

26. "Only Non-Experts Can Lead Experts" (Chih yu wai-hang tsai neng ling-tao nei-hang), Wen Hui Pao, Shanghai, March 1958. Also, see articles concerning the movement to create "Jacks of all Trades" or "to-mien-shou," for example, Everyone Chooses to be a Jack of All Trades (Jen-jen cheng-ch'u ch'eng-wei 'to-mien shou'). JMJP, March 31, 1958. Also, "Anshan and Other Units Actively Cultivate Technical Personnel", (An-kang teng tan-wei chi-chi p'ei-yang chi-shu jell-yuan), JMJP, January 4, 1957.

27. Barry Richman, Industrial Society in Communist China (New York: Random House, 1968 ), p. 129 puts the number at 25 million. An NCNA report of May 9, 1960 put the number at 22 million, with 370,000 in spare-time colleges or universities.

28. "Workers Take the Initiative in Running Technical Schools", Chih-kung tung-shou pan chi-shu hsueh-hsiao), KJJP, June 15, 1958.

29. See NCNA reports for August 11 and 25, 1958; November 13, 1958; October 31, 1958. Also, "How We Train WorkerStatisticians" (Wo-men shih tsem-yang p'ei-hsun kung-jen t'ungchi-yuan ti), Statistical Work, December 29, 1958.

30. Wang Chin-sheng, "Many Talents, Many Techniques: If Something is Lacking, It is Learned", China Youth, August 19, 1958. See also references to Jacks of all trades in note 26 above.

31. NCNA, Peking, January 11, 1960; similar reports came from Shanghai, NCNA, July 16, 1960; Wuhan and Changchun, NCNA, April 20, 1960.

32. Richman, Industrial Society, pp. 148-149.

33. "Anshan and Other Units . . ." op. cit., note 26 above. In 1956 alone, over 3,580 cadres and workers in factories at the Anshan complex went to spare-time universities and middle level technical schools.

34. "This is the Way We Raise the Professional Level of Work Section and Group Leaders" (Wo-men shih che-yang t'i-kao pan-tuan-chang ych-wu shui-p'ing ti), Coal Industry, November 19, 1957.

35. "Chungking Construction Machinery Plant Trains a Group of Cadres Both Workers and Technicians" (Ch'ung-ch'ing chien-she chi-ch'uang-ch'an p'ei-hsun ch'u yi-p'i kung-jen chi-shu kan-pu), Szechuan Daily, April 28, 1958; "Training Technical Personnel for the Nation for Five Years" (Wu-nien lai wei kuo-chia p'ci-yang chi-shu-yuan), Wen Hui Pao, Shanghai, January 22, 1958; "Technical Personnel of Working Class Background Increase Greatly" (Kung-jen ch'u-shen ti chi-shu jen-yuan ta-tseng), Wen Jui Pao, May 28, 1958; Cheng Tien, "From Workers to Engineers", China Pictorial, no. 24, December 20, 1959; "Factories and Mines in Peking Train Large Number of Leading Cadres" (Pei-ching-shih ko ch'an-k'uang ch'i-yeh p'ci-hsun-lo ta-p'i kung-jen ch'u-shen ti ling-tao kan-pu), JMJP, February 2, 1960.

36. For a discussion of the relationship between incentives and factory control systems, see Andors, Socialist Civilization, op. cit., chapter 4 and passim.

37. Ibid., chapters 5 and 6 for details of this conflict. Also, see Stephen Andors, "Factory Management and Political Ambiguity: 1961-63", China Quarterly, no. 59, July-September 1974.

38. Andors, Socialist Civilization, chapter 6.

39. Huang Jung-ch'ang, "Use the Thought of Mao Tse-tung to Defeat Bourgeois Authorities", KJJP, October 18, 1966, in SCMP, no. 3819, pp. 14-15. Huang was the deputy chief-engineer in the Chungking Iron and Steel Company; see also a story on the WuhanN Iron and Steel Complex, NCNA, Peking, September 21, 1966; also "Electro-plating Workers of Loyang Tractor Engine Factory Raise High the Great Red Banner of Mao Tse-tung's Thought, Defeat Bourgeois Technical Authorities, Blaze a China Type New Trail for Technology", in Hung Wei Pao, Canton, September 14, 1966, in SCMP no. 3793, pp. 22-27. For a description of a split in the ranks of technicians in the Shanghai Machine Tools Plant, see NCNA, Peking, September 19, 1966.

40. Richman, Industrial Society, pp. 761-762. See also K. S. Karol , China: The Other Communism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966 ), p. 239.

41. A "power seizure" usually meant the concrete expropriation of a symbol or seal of authority, such as the seal or "chop" of the Party Committee, or the keys to the committee's office, sometimes even the office itself. See "On the Seizure of Power in China: An Interview with David Crook", NCNA, Peking, July 26, 1967, in SCMP no. 3990, pp. 10-13. One of the first such power seizures to be publicized widely in the media in China was in the Shanghai Glass Making Machinery Plant, NCNA, Shanghai, Domestic Radio, January 10, 1967, as monitored by FBIS.

42. See James G. March, Handbook of Organization (RandMcNally, Chicago, 1965 ), pp. 4-5 for a good brief distinction between leadership which flows from organizational position and that which flows from personality or personal relations.

43. "Cadres Must Be Treated Correctly", Hung Cb'i, no. 4, February 1967, in SCMM, no. 566; San Fu-chen, Kai Ken-shu, and Ch'ai Feng-sheng, "We are Shouldering the Heavy Burden of Revolution", JMJP, January 11, 1967 in SCMP, no. 3865, pp. 15-16; "Support Industry with the Thought of Mao Tse-tung", Hung Cb'i, no. 6, June 1967, in SCMM, no. 577, pp. 18-23.

44. For examples, see "eking No. 2 Lathe Plant Smashes Schemes of the Bourgeois Reactionary Line and Wins Victories in Revolution and Production", JMJP, January 18, 1967 in SCMP, no. 3870; an article on the Harbin Boiler Plant, "Without Revolutionary Triple Combination, It is Impossible to Guarantee Victory in the Struggle to Seize Power", JMJP, March 19, 1967 in SCMP, no. 3907.


45. For details, see Andors, Socialist Civilization, chapter 7.

46. There are a few exceptions where the PLA seemed to be instrumental in power seizures themselves, rather than in helping those who wanted to seize or had already seized power. See the report on the Lingtze Woolen Mill in Tibet where many workers wanted to go back to Shanghai from whence they had come, NCNA, Peking, Domestic Service, April 17, 1967. An official "Letter from the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee to Revolutionary Workers and Cadres", NCNA, Peking, March 18, 1967, urged all workers and cadres to welcome PLA units when they came to the factories, thus implying that the process had just begun or was about to begin on a large scale

47. See SCMP, no. 3865, pp. 11-14.

48. See the report on the Shanghai Diesel Engine Plant, Shanghai City Service, August 4, 1967, as monitored by FBIS.

49. Contract workers were usually part-time or seasonal laborers from nearby communes who worked in either urban or rural factories on a contract basis. Auxiliary workers, on the other hand, might be partially unemployed urban residents who worked in transportation within or between factories in the city, or between local sources of supply outside the city and factories within it. Because of lack of mechanization, the ratio of auxiliary workers to "direct production" workers was unusually high. Probably some of the auxiliary workers were temporary or contract labor hired on a seasonal basis. See Richman, Industrial Society, pp. 579-580 for a discussion. Also, David and Nancy Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside (New York: Pantheon, 1976 ), pp. 186-195 has a fascinating and enlightening description of the role of the contract workers in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. On January 5, 1967 over 100,000 of them held a mass rally in Shanghai to pledge support for the Cultural Revolution, but these workers were by no means the major source of support for the initial power seizures which were often motivated by different goals from those held by the contract workers. For a good essay describing the economic discrimination that these workers were subject to, see "Thoroughly Abolish the System of Temporary Labor and Outside Contract Labor", Wen Hui Pao, January 6, 1967.

50. Other articles dealing with the role of contract and temporary labor are Red Rebel Team, Ministry of Labor and Revolutionary Rebel Team of Red Workers and Staff Members, Ministry of Labor, "Information about Liu Shao-chi in the System of Temporary and Contract Labor", in SCMM, no. 616, pp. 21-28. Also, see an unsigned Red Guard Piece called "The Present System of Contract Labor is a Big Anti-Mao Tse-tung Thought Poisonous Weed," in the files of the Union Research Institute, Hong Kong. In a "Notice of the CCP Central Committee and State Council," it was however noted clearly that the contract labor system would not be abolished, and that the Cultural Revolution was not dependent on the fate of this system in the immediate future and would continue even after discrimination against these workers ended. See T'i-yu Chan-bsien (Physical Culture Fighting Front), no date, in SCMP, no. 3913, pp. 2-3.

51. See "On Seizure of Power in China . . ." op. cit., note 41 above. For a good analysis of relative improvements in living standards in China since 1949, see Victor Lippit, "Economic Development and Welfare in China", Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, volume IV, no. 2, pp. 76-85.

52. Li Ping, "Model Workers Must Stand at the Forefront of The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution", Hung Ch'i, no. 1, January 1967. See also, N Domestic Radio, March 19, 1967, as monitored by FBIS.

53. Ch'ien Chun-pang, "Thoroughly Uncover the Big Conspiracy of Economism", Kuang-ming Jib-pao (KMJP), January 16, 1967 in SCMP, no. 3870; Chun Li, "Main Orientation of Struggle Must Never Be Altered", JMJP, January 16, 1967, in SCMP, no. 3868.

54. "Shanghai Workers Promote Production in the Revolution", NCNA, Shanghai, December 30, 1967 in SCMP, no. 4092; also David and Nancy Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside, pp. 188-195.

55. See references in note 54.


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Publication Information: Article Title: The Dynamics of Mass Campaigns in Chinese Industry: Initiators, Leaders, and Participants in the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius. Contributors: Stephen Andors - author. Journal Title: Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. Volume: 8. Issue: 4. Publication Year: 1976. Page Number: 45. This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.