Mao’s Cultural Revolution Pt 5. Deep Among the People
Posted by n3wday on December 11, 2008
Chinese farmers during the Cultural Revolution
This is the seventh of 8 articles composing a paper that was written by the MLM Revolutionary Study group. Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, are available on Kasama. The other parts will soon follow.
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Evaluating the Cultural Revolution (5): Workers, Peasants and Barefoot Doctors.
by the MLM Revolutionary Study Group
This installment describes how workers transformed their factories, how peasants were empowered, and how health care was brought to the vast majority of the population in the countryside during the CR.
Narrowing and Overcoming Class Differences and Inequalities in Socialist Society
Under socialism, production is planned to meet the needs of society rather than maximize profit. However, as noted earlier, many inequalities continue to exist in socialist society. These include significant differences in education, cultural level and technical expertise, wage inequalities, differences between the rural areas and the more advanced cities, and in access to decision making power. These social relations and class differences must be transformed step by step through mass initiatives and campaigns in order to advance along the socialist road. Below we look at the radical transformations of the Cultural Revolution in industry and agriculture. [1]
Workers Transform Their Factories
After the Cultural Revolution was launched in the spring of 1966, politically conscious workers in China’s industrial centers watched events closely. Some made contact with local Red Guard groups and began to discuss their grievances with the top-down system of management that had been widely imposed in the early 1960s. One of the first groups to organize themselves in the factories was the “revolutionary technicians,” many of who were former workers. They began to criticize the formally educated “technical authorities” in their plants who relied on Western or Soviet technical methods and refused to experiment or listen to workers’ suggestions for innovations.[2]
The mass uprising of hundreds of thousands of workers in Shanghai in January 1967 was a signal to workers elsewhere, particularly workers in large state-owned enterprises who had participated in the Great Leap Forward, to organize and seize power from managers and party cadre who were running their factories like capitalist enterprises. These power seizures were led by varying combinations of rank and file workers, work group leaders, technicians, middle-level managers, and revolutionary cadre at various levels.[3] Where these in-plant uprisings took place, elected revolutionary committees–composed of workers, technicians and party cadre–took over directing the daily activities of the factories. This new form of factory management was promoted as a model and spread nationwide during 1967 and early 1968.
This political mobilization and surge of China’s industrial workers enabled them to make many of the transformations within the factories that had first been attempted with varying degrees of success during the Great Leap Forward. Piece wage systems were abolished; by 1971, individual and group bonuses had been eliminated in most plants.[4] Production teams took over managerial responsibilities for their units. They took attendance, planned daily tasks, recorded use of materials, scheduled maintenance, performed quality control and coordinated production with other units. In some factories, yearly production quotas were determined after a lengthy process of consultation with all units in the plant, and production teams determined their own pay within the basic wage scale, based on length of experience, level of skill, and their attitude towards work and fellow workers.[5]
At the same time, the 8 grade wage system—in which the differential between the highest paid skilled workers and the lowest paid unskilled workers averaged three to one—was not a subject of struggle. One reason for this was that seniority allowed workers’ wages to increase over the years; in some cases, senior skilled workers made more than managers.[6]
As the Cultural Revolution progressed, managers and full-time cadre in all industrial enterprises were required to work on the shop floors on a regular or rotating basis. Those with intellectual backgrounds were given training in a particular skill. Members of in-plant revolutionary committees, as well as their administrative staff, participated in labor and made regular visits to the shop floor to assess conditions and make decisions. “Triple combinations” of workers, technicians and administrators were organized to solve technical problems and make innovations at the point of production.
Though it undoubtedly varied greatly from plant to plant, political study was a part of the daily work routine. Mao’s works were not studied as abstract theory, but as a method of investigating and solving production problems and political issues in the factories. In late 1967, a campaign in the factories was launched to criticize Liu Shaoqi’s “70 Articles” from the early 1960s in order to clarify the differences between socialist and capitalist mechanisms of production both within the factories and in the system of nationwide economic planning and organization.[7]
Particularly in the large state-owned enterprises, dependence on advanced foreign technology, Soviet or Western, was criticized. The large oilfields at Daqing in northeast China, which had been opened and operated with Chinese equipment and engineering, were held up a national model for self-reliant effort which created new production methods and products suited to Chinese conditions. This policy helped protect China’s political independence as well.
In addition, news of the progress of the Cultural Revolution and revolutionary struggles around the world was widely available in the plants. Individual workers could make their views known on any subject within or outside the plant by pasting dazibaos on the walls or by speaking out at “mass airings” in front of the entire factory staff. This system promoted a constant give-and-take between the workers and the factory’s revolutionary committee.
In order to raise the technical and educational level of greater numbers of workers at all skill levels, a variety of schools and training institutes were set up inside the factories. In one large Shanghai machine tools plant, a “July 21 university” enrolled its first class of fifty two workers in 1968, with an average age of 29. A two and a half year course prepared to them to become technicians in the factory with a high level of political consciousness. By 1974, there were 34 factory-run full-time workers’ universities in Shanghai.[8]
Women worked in skilled industrial jobs for the first time
In many factories, “spare time schools” were set up, where hundreds of workers studied technology, politics and culture. Since women were more recent arrivals to many factories, these in-plant training courses created increased opportunities for them to move into higher skilled jobs. A factory worker in Beijing described the classes she had attended that were given by veteran skilled workers:
They taught us about electricity, how to read blueprints, geometry, chemistry, all kinds of things that we needed to know to do our job well. I thing that by having the actual experience of working in the factory combined with theory in the classes, we learned much quicker, and we did not slow down production.[9]
The new system of factory management was put to use in solving a thorny production problem at the Anshan Iron and Steel Works, the largest, but also one of the oldest industrial complexes in China. In the 1960s, the plant’s production of rolled steel was beginning to fall. In 1971, leading cadre at one of Anshan’s old smelting mills claimed that its output could only be raised through an infusion of state funds, causing their renovation plan to remain on paper for years.
After these leaders were criticized for not relying on the workers in the mills, the responsible revolutionary committee organized a dozen “three-in-one” teams who worked closely with shop floor workers to solve the difficult technological problems of modernizing the mill. Using only internal funds, the workers rebuilt the old mill and were able to double its output.[10]
The mass campaign at Anshan rooted out conservative views on how to increase production and state funds by relying on the workers’ political consciousness and their hands-on understanding of production. During the Cultural Revolution this orientation was capsulized in the phrase “grasp revolution, promote production.” Despite some disruptions during the Cultural Revolution, industrial production in China grew by more than 10% yearly from 1966 to 1976. [11]
These revolutionary innovations in industry were not uniform. In more than a few factories, workers faced strong resistance from party cadre, managers and technicians to the new system of factory administration. However, it was deeply rooted in some areas. In December 1976, even after the military coup that brought an end to the Maoist era, an Italian teacher visited a power station in Shanghai where the workers still shared in management at all levels, and young workers were sent to universities to return to the plant as technicians.[12]
As the Deng Xiaoping regime consolidated power in the late 1970s, these transformations were wiped out. Under the new “manager responsibility” system, all authority was placed in the hands of factory managers. They decided how production was organized, whether to hire or fire employees, how much to pay workers, and how much they, the new bosses, would get paid.
Peasant Empowerment and Learning from Dazhai
Learn from Dazhai
While the mass upsurges of the Cultural Revolution were concentrated in the cities, major social transformations took place in the rural areas, where 80% of the people still lived. With encouragement from Red Guard groups in village middle schools, peasants in many areas formed independent mass associations. This movement launched a frontal challenge to the traditional political culture of submission to authority in the countryside.
These organizations of newly empowered peasants brought the political attitudes and work habits of party cadre and leadership at all levels—the commune, production brigade and production team [13]—under intense scrutiny. Mao’s works became a weapon, a de facto constitution, for peasants in their debates with abusive and bureaucratic village leaders. According to a number of peasants interviewed in the 1990s, the term “newly arisen bourgeoisie” referred to party leaders who did not work but bossed people around like the old landlords and capitalists.[14]
Commune leaders no longer appointed production team leaders; they were elected by the team members. If the leaders did not do a good job, they would lose their positions at the end of the year. In one county in Shandong, the production team leaders had to be replaced every year.[15] An important part of the evaluation of local party cadre was how much time they spent working alongside ordinary farmers in the fields.
Beginning in late 1967, a new power structure began to replace the old party apparatus in many areas. Mass associations, composed mainly of poor and lower middle peasants, chose people to sit on newly organized village revolutionary committees. These committees exercised day to day leadership in the villages and on the communes.[16]
With the encouragement of cultural workers from the cities, peasants developed as painters, writers and performers. A vast expansion of education and health services brought immediate benefits to the lives of people in the rural areas.
Poster shows model commune, Dazhai in early 70s
The expansion of private plots and free markets in the early 1960s was reversed, with a renewed emphasis on political consciousness and collective effort. Dazhai, one brigade of a commune in a rocky and eroded part of Shanxi Province, was promoted as a model for agriculture during the Cultural Revolution. According to William Hinton, who spent decades working in the Chinese countryside:
With a spirit of self-reliance, and without aid from the state, Dazhai transformed its hills and gullies into fertile fields by cutting stone, laying up walls, and carrying in earth. This transformation was carried out through collective effort after protracted political education and in the course of constant struggle against individualism and private-profit mentality. The result was a gradually rising standard of living for all members of the brigade, expanding sales of surplus grain to the state instead of demands for relief, the accumulation of reserves against bad years, the reconstruction of most of the housing in the village, and the establishment of many community projects to serve the people and community industries to supplement agricultural income.[17]
In 1971, the Dazhai brigade was linking together hillside terraces and low-lying plots to be able to utilize farm machinery. In the preceding years, the county in which Dazhai was located had built its own garden tractors, electrical generators, a chemical fertilizer plant, a small iron blast furnace, and became self-sufficient in cement. [18]
During the Cultural Revolution, there was a big push to mechanize agriculture. In the farming area around Shanghai, the amount of land that was machine-tilled grew from 17% in 1965 to 76% in 1972. The rural industrialization program begun during the Great Leap Forward was accelerated. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, there were nearly 800,000 rural industrial enterprises, plus 90,000 small hydroelectric stations, producing 15% of China’s industrial output.[19] These advances could not have been achieved without the rapid expansion of the rural educational system during the Cultural Revolution, which produced agricultural experts, and technicians and skilled workers for commune factories and workshops.
In areas of the countryside where there was strong leadership, there were impressive gains in production, but in other areas production stagnated.[20] Many large-scale infrastructural projects that were aimed at increasing agricultural productivity and the peasants’ standard of living were undertaken during the Cultural Revolution involving tens of thousands of workers. In one part of Guangdong Province that the CCAS delegation visited in 1971, three communes had joined together to build a huge network of irrigation and flood control projects, including three large dams. Each dam had its own small hydroelectric station.
In one county in Shandong Province, large-scale infrastructural projects were often popular initiatives, an important change from the Great Leap Forward, when peasants were sent out to work by commune and village leaders with no input on their part. On some projects, schoolteachers, students and local government employees joined the construction crews after they got off work. [21]
These social and economic transformations in the Chinese countryside were thrown sharply into reverse after 1976. The achievements of the Dazhai brigade were denounced as a fraud. The communes and collectives were broken up, and land was distributed to peasant households in what became known as the “family responsibility system.” Cadres, relatives, friends and cronies were able to buy at massive discounts the tractors, trucks, wells, pumps, processing equipment and other property that the collectives had accumulated over decades through the hard labor of all members.[22] Privatization also spelled the end of the collective health care system in the countryside.
Health Care and Barefoot Doctors
Prior to the Cultural Revolution, health care resources—doctors, hospital facilities and money—were concentrated in the cities. This system left hundreds of millions of peasants with rudimentary medical care, and it impeded the flow of advanced medical knowledge back to the villages.
One of the most dynamic innovations of the Cultural Revolution was the system of “barefoot doctors” that helped narrow the gap in health services between rural and urban areas. By the mid-1970s, more than a million of these paramedics, four times as many as in 1965, were working in the countryside. Many of them were educated urban youth who were part of the movement “down to the villages.”
The first group of 28 barefoot doctors, trained by Shanghai doctors in 1968 at Chiangchen People’s Commune, set a pioneering example for the country. Their guidelines were to serve the countryside, to place prevention of diseases first, and to combine mental and manual labor—”calluses on hands, mud on feet, medicine kit on shoulder, poor and lower-middle peasants in mind.”
One of the first steps taken by these new medical workers was to train disease-prevention health workers from the peasants, enabling each production brigade to have its own health center. In one brigade, the barefoot doctors devoted a third to a half of their time to farm work. This not only created a medical corps with strong ties to the peasants, it enabled brigade doctors to help develop a rice strain that had high yields and eliminated disease-bearing mosquitoes. Finally, upon the recommendations of the peasants they worked with, the commune sent five barefoot doctors to medical school to pursue more advanced studies.[23]
Urban hospitals and medical schools turned their attention to the countryside, establishing medical centers on communes and providing doctors to staff them. A commune hospital or clinic served two purposes: as a treatment center for seriously ill patients, and as a training center for barefoot doctors and midwives. After an initial training course of six months to a year, they would return for follow-up courses during the slack season. They continued to work in the fields and were paid by their communes.
Barefoot doctors were often young women
The tasks of these new doctors went far beyond the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses. They administered vaccinations, demonstrated the correct use of pesticides, introduced new sanitation methods, and taught mothers about nutrition and child care. In addition to helping rural women to give birth at home, midwives were trained to diagnose a difficult birth early enough to bring the mother to a commune hospital. At the rural hospitals and clinics visited by the CCAS delegation, medicine was free. [24]
During the same years, Red Medical Teams, an urban and industrial version of the barefoot doctors, were established. After a basic course and recurrent follow-up sessions, they staffed factory clinics and cared for the health of their fellow workers.
The training of doctors and medical staff at urban hospitals also went through major changes during the Cultural Revolution. In medical schools, the program of study was shortened from six years to three years, followed by an internship of one and a half years. The curriculum was revised to place more emphasis on preventative medicine. Most graduates were generalists, not specialists. They would spend a good part of their lives in the countryside as part of mobile teams, or they resettled there.[25]
In addition, many traditional forms of medicine, such as herbal remedies and acupuncture anesthesia, were widely used during the Cultural Revolution. Research institutes studied Chinese medicine to put it on a scientific and standardized basis, while many hospitals began to combine Chinese and Western medicine into an integrated system for the treatment of illness.
The end of the Cultural Revolution led to a rapid and drastic decline in the health care system in the countryside. The barefoot doctor system was abandoned by Deng’s regime in 1981. Doctors set up their own private practices, making medical treatment well beyond the means of most villagers. After the collectives were dissolved in 1983, health care insurance disappeared in the countryside. [26]
Radical social transformations in education, health care, culture, industry, agriculture, the position of women, and collective, internationalist values were essential to achieving the aims of the Cultural Revolution. Still, the course that the Cultural Revolution took varied tremendously across China’s huge territory. The revolutionary transformations described above were uneven, and were not implemented over a long enough period to take firm root. Particularly as they came under attack by rightist forces, the “socialist new things” did not always survive, even prior to the revisionist coup in 1976 that brought the Cultural Revolution to an end.
Notes:
1. This is an important part of “transforming the relations of production.” See page 76 for an explanation of this concept.
2. Andors, p. 163,
3. Ibid., pp. 165-172.
4. Ibid., p. 218. These decisions were made at the factory level.
5. Gamberg, p. 190.
6. Andors, p. 221.
7. Ibid., p. 187.
8. CCAS, p. 178; Andors, p. 237.
9. Gamberg, p. 284.
10. New China’s First Quarter-Century, pp. 79-82. http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/classics/lifeundermao/newchina1975.html
11. Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era: 1978-1994, 1996, p. 189; Mobo Gao, “Debating the Cultural Revolution,” pp. 424-25.
12. Masi, pp. 219-20.
13. The team, consisting of 20-30 families, was the basic unit of production. The team leadership was responsible for the day-to-day planning of farming, calculation of work-points, and the distribution of income. The production brigade was composed of several teams. Ten to thirty production brigades made up a commune, which was mainly concerned with overall planning, building new factories and infrastructural projects, and with education and health services.
14. Dongping Han, p. 65.
15. Ibid.,p. 70.
16. Ibid., pp. 67-68. For a study of similar transformations in Sichuan Province, see Stephen Endicott, Red Earth; Revolution in a Sichuan Village, 1989.
17. Hinton, Turning Point in China, p. 42. Due to Dazhai’s abolishment of private plots and emphasis on political education, conservative party officials and military commanders in some areas opposed implementing the “Learn from Dazhai” campaign.
18. CCAS, pp. 171-173.
19. Feigon, pp. 168,169.
20. According to Hinton, “In the countryside, for every village that prospered, another village stagnated, while still a third made indifferent progress. Many factors contributed to this mixed record, but the most important was inadequate leadership. Where a village had a capable, honest and committed party secretary, and best of all a party branch to match, it tended to forge ahead.”Even though many well-run communes doubled or tripled their output, China’s grain production during the Maoist era was only slightly ahead of population growth. “The Chinese Revolution,“ Monthly Review, November 1991, p. 9. Jimo Country in Shandong, in which per capita income more than doubled between 1966 and 1976, was an example of the first category. Dongping Han, p. 147.
21. Dongping Han, pp. 128-130.
22. For a detailed analysis of the post-Cultural Revolution “reforms” in agriculture, see William Hinton, The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978-1989, 1990.
23. New China’s First-Quarter Century, pp. 199-209. See also the description in Meisner, p. 360.
24. CCAS, pp. 239-240.
26. Mobo Gao, p. 88.
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