BobKKKindle$
22nd November 2009, 23:25
It was at this point that the working class entered the stage as an autonomous and powerful force. Harding is mistaken in assuming that this was a result of the leadership's rhetoric becoming more radical or working-class mass organizations receiving official sanction in November, when it was decided that workers would be allowed to set up representative bodies and exchange their experiences, as Sheehan has rightly pointed out that these decisions were simply a case of elites recognizing a process that was already taking place. Nor were students responsible for what followed, as Sheehan reports that, in many instances, students displayed a patronizing attitude towards workers once they learned that they would have to share leadership of the movement, which, in turn, generated attitudes of hostility on the part of workers, to the extent that, in Beijing especially, there were frequent violent clashes between the two groups, even when students had visited enterprises from which they had previously been barred with the intention of giving support to the workers. From late 1966 onwards, there were multiple forms of working-class activism, with these forms interacting with one another in complex ways. The first development in this area was the formation of rebel worker organizations, and of these the most influential was the Workers General Headquarters, which, being located in Shanghai, was founded in November 1966, and immediately made clear its aim of challenging the party authorities in Shanghai by commandeering a train in what was to become the first of a series of disruptions to China's transport system during the course of the Cultural Revolution, otherwise known as the Anting Incident, and beginning the journey to Beijing with the intention of drawing the national leadership's attention to both Cao Diqiu and Zhang Qi's failure to give their support, these individuals being the Mayor of Shanghai and the Director of the SFTU respectively. The expedition to Beijing was halted by the intervention of Zhang Chunqiao, who succeeded in forcing the rebels to return to Shanghai and initially agreed with the demand of Cao not to sanction the WGH or its disruption of rail traffic, but ultimately gave in to the demands of the organization when he met with its leader, Wang Hongwen, which directly contradicted Cao's decision, and included recognizing the WGH as a “revolutionary and legal organization”, assigning all of the responsibility for the outcome of the Anting Incident to the East China Bureau and the Shanghai Party Committee, and providing various sorts of aid to the WGH in order to facilitate its future work. Zhang's decision received the approval of Mao as soon as it was reported, and Perry reports that from this point on increasing numbers of rebels across the country and in Shanghai abandoned their work posts in order to devote more time to rebel activities, although it was only in Shanghai that workers were able to dominate the Cultural Revolution.
Perry has also noted that, contrary to the assumptions of other commentators, the WGH was by no means empty of party members, and did in fact have an above-average level of party membership compared to the whole of the workforce – 15.7% compared to 12.1%, and the former had increased to 18.2% by January 1967 as a result of more workers having entered the organization – and it was also the case that the level of education for WGH members tended to be relatively high, mainly as a result of the membership being younger than average, as being born just before or after the foundation of the PRC had enabled members to benefit from the education reforms implemented shortly after the CPC's victory. The young age of the membership is also regarded as important by Perry on the grounds that they lacked a pre-1949 comparison and therefore had no reason to defend the post-1949 industrial arrangements in the interests of preventing the restoration of what had existed before, and indeed it is significant that, in September, when the SPC was being challenged by rebel students, thousands of elderly and retired workers reportedly converged at the SPC headquarters, with a poster signed by thirty-six workers from the No.2 Cotton Mill and entitled “We older workers want to speak out!” being posted up in order to show support for the municipal authorities. As such, it seems that a further influence on political attitudes was age group, which manifested itself in the behaviour of older workers towards rebel mass movements. However, by far the most salient characteristic of the WGH and other rebel worker organization was the relatively large number of members, who, despite also being members of the CPC in some instances, had been disciplined by factory authorities in the past, or had in some other way been given an incentive to take action against the existing power structure, and in this respect Walder's analysis of factory networks seems to be the most analytically useful device for understanding the events of the Cultural Revolution in workplaces. To take one example from the WGH leadership, Huang Jinhai's ambitions were reportedly thwarted during the 1950s when his father was found guilty of embezzling funds in order to fund his opium addition, and he also failed to receive credit for a method of reusing discarded parts that he had developed in conjunction with several other workers, eventually leading him to engage in the pursuit of various luxury and conspicuous goods that were regarded as inappropriate in the environment of asceticism just after the failure of the Great leap Forward, including a western suit, and a tie, such that other workers described him colloquially as a “dandy”, and he was branded a “backward element”. It was the disapproval Huang met for these minor forms of resistance that led him to produce a dazibao accusing the party general branch of not being diligent during political study sessions, which allowed him to take up a position on the WGH Standing Committee when the organization came into being. The conservative organizations that emerged to provide a counterbalance to the growing weight of the rebels, of which the most important was the Scarlet Guards in Shanghai, were, as one might expect, populated mainly by labour models, including 1958 national “hero of the masses” representative Meng Dehe, as well as veterans of the 1927 uprising in Shanghai, although Perry also reports that there were a number of workers with bad records who joined in order to avoid being targeted by the authorities, and that, in order to avoid being accused of royalism, the organization excluded cadres above the level of department chief, as well as clerical personnel who were not on the same pay scale as ordinary workers. There was nonetheless intense conflict between rival organizations, these conflicts representing a division of interests with regard to the status quo, affirming the central argument of this essay that the Cultural Revolution can only be understood in terms of workers seeking to improve their position.
The emergence of rebel and conservative organizations was important, but it was by no means the only or even the most important way in which the working class mobilized itself. This role was played by a phenomenon that the national leadership designated “the wind of economism”, which, according to Walder, involved members of both radical and conservative factions, as well as those who had not taken either side, but was centered around workers whose legal status or lack thereof had led to them being subject to forms and levels of exploitation that were not experienced by the rest of the working class. The role of contract and temporary workers was instrumental in this area, who according to Perry, did not receive lifetime securities, pensions, subsidies, disability coverage, health insurance for their dependents, as well as other benefits to which permanent workers were entitled, and were also paid by the day or on a piecework basis instead of by the month, and were paid lower wages then permanent workers despite often being assigned to the most strenuous forms of labour and facing the threat of being fired at short notice, to the extent that whereas the lowest monthly wage for a permanent worker in Shanghai at this time was 40 yuan, many contract and temporary workers were paid less than 30 yuan, whilst also being barred from membership of trade unions and the CPC. These workers organized themselves as the “Red Workers” in Shanghai and elsewhere, and were joined by a number of other segments who shared their concerns, such as those workers who had been mobilized to return to their native places as a result of the recovery campaigns of the 1960s, and who had then returned to Shanghai once the economic situation had resolved itself and not been allowed to gain permanent status, those workers who had been sent to the interior to support industrialization, young people who had been sent to distant locales to assist with work on state farms, including the 20,000 teenagers from Shanghai who had been sent to Xinjiang in 1963 alone, and finally those who had formerly been private entrepreneurs, with all of these groups organizing themselves separately whilst also being part of the same broad movement and sharing the same interests in relation to the bureaucracy. Perry reports that, following a meeting held between the Red Workers and the key members of the Cultural Revolution Small Group towards the end of December, it was initially decided that this organization and the workers it represented would be protected from job dismissal and the withholding of wages whilst they participated, and that workers who had lost their jobs during with previous six months would be allowed to return to their work units at once and would receive back wages, with Jiang Qing apparently crying at this meeting when she was informed of what temporary workers had endured.
However, what followed led to the whole of the leadership condemning the ambitions of those workers who took part, and it was arguably from this point that the leadership sought to constrain mass participation, and the contradictions between the working class and the state became most evident. The movement itself involved workers putting intense pressure on local cadres to increase their wages, to the extent that, at the East China Electrical Bureau, to take just one enterprise as an example, the average monthly wage bill had formerly totaled 330,000 yuan, but the enterprise was forced to disburse a total sum of 1.28 million on January 5th in order to meet the demands of its workers, and an organization that described itself as the “Elementary Teachers' Headquarters” and claimed to have a membership of 10,000 in Shanghai alone succeeded in getting private schools re-designated as state-owned, which resulted in a wage increase of 70% at one such school, due to the benefits associated with state ownership for workers. The importance of subsidies in supporting working-class living standards was such that workers at almost every collective or private enterprise in Shanghai demanded that they be treated in the same way as workers at state enterprises as far as receiving benefits and being able to join a trade union was concerned, with state workers also demanding that the benefits which had been withdrawn as a result of the negative impacts of the Great Leap Forward be withdrawn, and legitimizing their demands by combining wage increases with requests that gave the appearance of wanting to participate in the non-economic aspects of the Cultural Revolution, such as fees to exchange revolutionary experiences, produce armbands, buy broadcasting equipment, and so on. Perry goes on to show that the wage increases gained by workers generated immediate increases in consumption, reflecting the extent to which consumption had been repressed during the preceding decades in order to sustain a high level of accumulation, such that, from January 1st to the 8th of the same month, Shanghai's largest department store experienced a growth in sales of 36.3% over the same period of the previous year, with purchases of bicycles and watches being particularly prominent, but by far the most impressive manifestation of economism in the sphere of consumption was the seizure of housing, which was carried out under the pretext of expelling “capitalist roaders”, “four pests”, and “reactionary authorities”, further affirming the ability of workers to manipulate the language of the state.
It is highly significant that the process of forcing cadres to make concessions caused considerable disruption to the economy, provoking opposition not only from the national leadership, but also from the rebel leaders, including Wang Hongwen himself, indicating that it is wrong as Meisner does to treat economism and the emergence of rebel organizations as basically the same phenomenon. Sheehan reports that on the 9th of January, that is, immediately after the orgy of consumption in Shanghai, the WGH released an “Urgent Notice” which was published throughout the country as part of the People's Daily on the 12th and decreed that those who had sabotaged production would be arrested by the Public Security Bureau, “in accordance with the law”, that the participants were also guilty of having opposed Mao, that workers would no longer be allowed to share revolutionary experiences, that they would be made to repay the expense money they had used to travel to other work units and cities, that workers and cadres both had a duty to return to their original units and work for eight hours each day, that wages would be frozen, and that enterprise funds would no longer be used to make unauthorized payments to workers making “economistic” demands, which were attributed to the work of “revisionists”. The same author also notes that the rebel leaders made extensive use of students to enforce the backlash by making them serve as strike breakers in the event that workers refused to go back to their work units, and it is partly for this reason that there were radio reports in mid-January of students being attacked by workers in Guangzhou. This response on the part of the rebel leaders is relevant to the essay because it shows that elements of mass participation encountered opposition not only from those who had been in positions of power before the Cultural Revolution began but also those who had benefited from it and found themselves becoming part of the elite, Wang Hongwen being the clearest example of this tendency. The response to economism also embodied the formation of new power structures in Shanghai, and whilst these have been treated by some scholars as cases of “power seizures”, indicating a change in the balance of political power, a close examination reveals that they were actually part of the process of restoring production and order, even when these structures were later opposed by the leadership because they placed too much power in the hands of local rebels. Meisner points out that the Shanghai People's Commune had its leaders appointed by Beijing, and that Yao Wenyuan and Zhang Chunqiao used the PLA to enforce order in the name of the commune as long it was allowed to exist by the national leadership, and at the inauguration of the new structure in early January they stressed that they had the support of the army, whilst excluding their political opponents from planning and leadership - the implication being that challenging the organization would be met with armed force, and according to Lee, even before the commune came into being, the rebel leaders had managed to combat economism to some degree, by taking control of the Control Office of the Shanghai Railway Bureau, and putting the railway system into action, with conductors being sought out and pressured into working, and students being mobilized to man the ticket booths and entry points to the railway platforms. Meisner also reports that the slogan “all power to the commune” was frequently head in Shanghai in early 1967, indicating a genuine desire for more participatory forms of administration, but nonetheless, the commune was criticized as a form of “extreme democracy”, and Sheehan reports that from February onwards even the use of the term “commune” was banned by the national leadership, with the three-in-one combination model that had arisen in Heilongjiang being promoted as the only acceptable form of administration, due to the privileged role this model gave to both cadres and the PLA, in addition to mass organizations.
The events that followed signified that the national leadership was anxious to maintain control of the situation, and they enforced control not merely by means of administrative methods, such as the issuing of decrees, but through using the PLA an an instrument of domination and violence, this struggle culminating in the defeat of the radical forces in the early months of 1968, this point also signifying the end of the most relevant phase of the Cultural Revolution as far as the working class and this essay is concerned. There was an ideological element to the bureaucracy's efforts, as Meisner reports that in April the campaign against Liu Shaoqi was intensified in a futile attempt to divert the attention of workers away from the basic structure of Chinese society and towards a specific individual who could be cited as responsible for the injustices of the past, this narrowing taking place alongside an intensification of Mao's personality cult, and Zhou Enlai also made efforts to characterize 95% of the cadres as progressive in order to prevent further challenges to political stability, with this group being described as the “backbone of the struggle to seize power”, but the level of radical activity was such that only the PLA was able to resolve the struggles in favour of the elite. The role of the PLA encompassed semi-peaceful tactics, such as sending officials to local area to create broad “great revolutionary alliances” to diminish conflict, these alliances encompassing both conservative and radical organizations, but Sheehan reports that the PLA fundamentally relied on violence, and as such it rapidly banned a large umber of radical organizations, whose members were made to register with the municipal Public Security Bureau, and frequently subject to the same kind of penalties that had been used against those who had gone too far during previous campaigns, such as firing, transferring, the docking of pay, and, unlike past campaigns, struggle sessions. It is noteworthy that the PLA was told to support the left when it was allowed to intervene, but, for the leadership, this was understood to mean not the radical organizations but the conservatives, the latter being comprised of privileged workers, and in support of his argument that no-one amongst the national leadership had any illusions about what the PLA was being sent in to do, Lee points to the case of Fujian, where, when the August 29 Commune, representing the radicals, took control of the provincial Party Committee in January, it did not gain the official approval of the centre, but when the Revolutionary Rebel Committee, representing the conservatives, condemned the power seizure as a instance of “the bourgeois reactionary line” in February, it received the support of the PLA at a local level, who organized a mass rally in their support, and also the support of the centre, who printed their declaration in the People's Daily, and promptly ordered that the rebels be arrested. Walder agrees with this viewpoint by pointing out that it was mainly the radicals who were victimized during the “cleanse the class ranks” campaign, as well as subsequent initiatives such as the campaign to eliminate “May 16 elements” in 1968, but the persecution carried out by the PLA was not without resistance on the part of the radicals, as Meisner reports that in from April onwards there were wall posters in Beijing attacking Zhou Enlai as leader of red capitalist class, due to that individual's role in instigating the PLA's intervention, and restoring cadres, as well as physical attacks on state offices and ministries, particularly the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where radical Red Guards were said to have seized and destroyed secret documents, and demanded that Chen Yi be ousted, due to his role as a veteran PLA Marshal. This resistance and the factional violence associated with it was of such intensity that in April only 4 out of 27 provinces and autonomous regions apart from Shanghai and Beijing had set up officially approved revolutionary committees, and it was in order to eliminate the remnants of the radicals that, on September 5th, the radicals were instructed to return the arms that had been taken from the PLA, which was described as a “peerless people's army”, with Jiang Qing being given the task of announcing these decisions to the Chinese people, an opportunity she utilized opportunistically in order to renounce her past views and to declare that the radicals she has allegedly sided with before that point were actually members of a “typical counterrevolutionary organization”. Meisner reports that, alongside continuing and intensified military repression, the journal Red Flag, which had been one of the most hysteric proponents of radicalism up to that point, was ordered to cease publication, with the old generals figuring prominently on the podium alongside Mao on National Day, shortly before the Cultural Revolution Small Group itself came to an end in November. The legacy of the PLA's repression tells us that the political attitudes of the leadership towards mass participation were centered around fear of what would happen if radical workers were allowed to become too confident, and it is through the terror and persecution of this period that we can explain the death toll of the Cultural Revolution.
It was in this context that the radicals developed a coherent critique of the society that had existed since 1949 that did not centre around the idea of an otherwise egalitarian order being infiltrated or subverted by a small number of undefinable capitalist roaders. They did so through an organization termed Sheng-wu-lien, comprised of 20 smaller organizations, which was publicly denounced by Zhou Enlai, Jiang Qing, Chen Boda, and Kang Sheng on January 26th of 1968, at a rally of 100,000 people in Changsha, as a "counter-revolutionary organization", and on the same day as the rally, Hunan Daily published an editorial entitled 'Thoroughly Smash Sheng-wu-lien, a Counter-Revolutionary Big Hotch-Potch', and, on February 8th, Zhou Enlai personally instructed the Southern Daily to reproduce the editorial for mass consumption. Kang Sheng had also asserted in a speech two days before the mass rally that the organization had received some of Trotsky's works and developed its analysis on the basis of his ideas, and, to put it lightly, the reaction of the leadership suggests that the organization was viewed as a serious threat, at the highest levels of the Chinese state, and Sheehan reports that the organization had a broader impact beyond Hunan, by giving rise to a number of local organizations which shared the same analysis of Chinese society and received the same response from the state, such as the “5 August Thought Trend” in Guangdong. The basic thesis of the organization, as developed in the document 'Whither China?', was that China was a class society in which the cadres and government officials constituted a red capitalist class whose privileged depended on the exploitation of the proletariat and peasantry, and who had imposed revolutionary committees in order to prevent the working class from realizing the goal of the People's Commune of China, which could only be obtained through the destruction of the bureaucracy, and would, in the style of the Paris Commune, involve officials being democratically elected and subject to recall at all times. The PLA is regarded as different from the army that overthrew the KMT in 1949, and the situation in Hunan is characterized as one of dual power, in which the role of the provisional government is played by the provincial revolutionary committee, and Sheng-wu-lien is described as a “power organ of mass dictatorship”, the development of the former in place of the provincial party committee and military district command signifying a “superficial” change and a means by which the power of bureaucracy was restored after the liberating events of 1966, due to “basic social changes” not being fulfilled. Most importantly of all, Mao is identified as responsible for the imposition of revolutionary committees, and the writers of the document announce, as if to imply a conclusion, or perhaps as an indication of the ongoing development of their theory, that his behaviour is “something which the revolutionary people find it hard to understand”, although it is not made clear whether the authors regard Mao himself as a member of the bureaucracy they seek to overthrow. Cliff has noted that praise for Mao is a persistent feature of the document, and suggests that this may have been due to the threat of pre-publication censorship, but it is highly intriguing that at the end of their essay, having announced their goal of working-class democracy, the authors end the essay with the declaration “Long Live Mao Tse-tung-ism!”, in place of the more conventional honorific of “Long Live Chairman Mao!” and, whilst there is no evidence to confirm this either way, it is tempting to argue that this reflected a view that Mao himself was no longer considered a faithful adherent of Maoist principles, such was his deviation from the emancipatory principles of the Cultural Revolution. If so, the finale of 'Whither China?' is the ultimate example of Chinese workers transforming a state-sponsored ideology into a weapon that could be used to articulate their own struggle against the ruling elites.
This essay has shown many things with regard to mass participation and political attitudes. It has been shown that mass participation was rooted in the dissatisfaction of Chinese workers with the prevailing order, and that divisions between different groups of workers, as examined through Walder's model of political networks, were also central in shaping attitudes and political behaviour. It has been shown that mass participation embodied multiple forms and that some of these forms were more all-encompassing than others, with economism being the movement that can be most accurately characterized as involving the whole of the working class. Furthermore, it has shown that Chinese workers were not unthinking instruments of factions, but demonstrated a remarkable capacity to use elements of elite ideology to their own advantage. With regard to the elite, it has been shown that the Cultural Revolution continued previous methods insofar as other campaigns had also involved mass participation, but that, unlike these campaigns, the Cultural Revolution posed a critical challenge to the legitimacy of the status quo, eventually resulting in the restoration of authority by violent means. In essence, the experience of mass participation demonstrates that China was a society rooted in class antagonisms, with these antagonisms forming the basis of divergent interests and attitudes. The Cultural Revolution was instigated by Mao but he was also its Bonaparte, and the contradictory nature of this event and indeed Mao as an individual can be understood as a reflection of the Chinese Revolution as a whole – it was an event and a process that signified the abolition of intense forms of oppression, but which ultimately instituted a new form of class oppression, leaving the working population's hunger for far-reaching change unfulfilled.
Perry has also noted that, contrary to the assumptions of other commentators, the WGH was by no means empty of party members, and did in fact have an above-average level of party membership compared to the whole of the workforce – 15.7% compared to 12.1%, and the former had increased to 18.2% by January 1967 as a result of more workers having entered the organization – and it was also the case that the level of education for WGH members tended to be relatively high, mainly as a result of the membership being younger than average, as being born just before or after the foundation of the PRC had enabled members to benefit from the education reforms implemented shortly after the CPC's victory. The young age of the membership is also regarded as important by Perry on the grounds that they lacked a pre-1949 comparison and therefore had no reason to defend the post-1949 industrial arrangements in the interests of preventing the restoration of what had existed before, and indeed it is significant that, in September, when the SPC was being challenged by rebel students, thousands of elderly and retired workers reportedly converged at the SPC headquarters, with a poster signed by thirty-six workers from the No.2 Cotton Mill and entitled “We older workers want to speak out!” being posted up in order to show support for the municipal authorities. As such, it seems that a further influence on political attitudes was age group, which manifested itself in the behaviour of older workers towards rebel mass movements. However, by far the most salient characteristic of the WGH and other rebel worker organization was the relatively large number of members, who, despite also being members of the CPC in some instances, had been disciplined by factory authorities in the past, or had in some other way been given an incentive to take action against the existing power structure, and in this respect Walder's analysis of factory networks seems to be the most analytically useful device for understanding the events of the Cultural Revolution in workplaces. To take one example from the WGH leadership, Huang Jinhai's ambitions were reportedly thwarted during the 1950s when his father was found guilty of embezzling funds in order to fund his opium addition, and he also failed to receive credit for a method of reusing discarded parts that he had developed in conjunction with several other workers, eventually leading him to engage in the pursuit of various luxury and conspicuous goods that were regarded as inappropriate in the environment of asceticism just after the failure of the Great leap Forward, including a western suit, and a tie, such that other workers described him colloquially as a “dandy”, and he was branded a “backward element”. It was the disapproval Huang met for these minor forms of resistance that led him to produce a dazibao accusing the party general branch of not being diligent during political study sessions, which allowed him to take up a position on the WGH Standing Committee when the organization came into being. The conservative organizations that emerged to provide a counterbalance to the growing weight of the rebels, of which the most important was the Scarlet Guards in Shanghai, were, as one might expect, populated mainly by labour models, including 1958 national “hero of the masses” representative Meng Dehe, as well as veterans of the 1927 uprising in Shanghai, although Perry also reports that there were a number of workers with bad records who joined in order to avoid being targeted by the authorities, and that, in order to avoid being accused of royalism, the organization excluded cadres above the level of department chief, as well as clerical personnel who were not on the same pay scale as ordinary workers. There was nonetheless intense conflict between rival organizations, these conflicts representing a division of interests with regard to the status quo, affirming the central argument of this essay that the Cultural Revolution can only be understood in terms of workers seeking to improve their position.
The emergence of rebel and conservative organizations was important, but it was by no means the only or even the most important way in which the working class mobilized itself. This role was played by a phenomenon that the national leadership designated “the wind of economism”, which, according to Walder, involved members of both radical and conservative factions, as well as those who had not taken either side, but was centered around workers whose legal status or lack thereof had led to them being subject to forms and levels of exploitation that were not experienced by the rest of the working class. The role of contract and temporary workers was instrumental in this area, who according to Perry, did not receive lifetime securities, pensions, subsidies, disability coverage, health insurance for their dependents, as well as other benefits to which permanent workers were entitled, and were also paid by the day or on a piecework basis instead of by the month, and were paid lower wages then permanent workers despite often being assigned to the most strenuous forms of labour and facing the threat of being fired at short notice, to the extent that whereas the lowest monthly wage for a permanent worker in Shanghai at this time was 40 yuan, many contract and temporary workers were paid less than 30 yuan, whilst also being barred from membership of trade unions and the CPC. These workers organized themselves as the “Red Workers” in Shanghai and elsewhere, and were joined by a number of other segments who shared their concerns, such as those workers who had been mobilized to return to their native places as a result of the recovery campaigns of the 1960s, and who had then returned to Shanghai once the economic situation had resolved itself and not been allowed to gain permanent status, those workers who had been sent to the interior to support industrialization, young people who had been sent to distant locales to assist with work on state farms, including the 20,000 teenagers from Shanghai who had been sent to Xinjiang in 1963 alone, and finally those who had formerly been private entrepreneurs, with all of these groups organizing themselves separately whilst also being part of the same broad movement and sharing the same interests in relation to the bureaucracy. Perry reports that, following a meeting held between the Red Workers and the key members of the Cultural Revolution Small Group towards the end of December, it was initially decided that this organization and the workers it represented would be protected from job dismissal and the withholding of wages whilst they participated, and that workers who had lost their jobs during with previous six months would be allowed to return to their work units at once and would receive back wages, with Jiang Qing apparently crying at this meeting when she was informed of what temporary workers had endured.
However, what followed led to the whole of the leadership condemning the ambitions of those workers who took part, and it was arguably from this point that the leadership sought to constrain mass participation, and the contradictions between the working class and the state became most evident. The movement itself involved workers putting intense pressure on local cadres to increase their wages, to the extent that, at the East China Electrical Bureau, to take just one enterprise as an example, the average monthly wage bill had formerly totaled 330,000 yuan, but the enterprise was forced to disburse a total sum of 1.28 million on January 5th in order to meet the demands of its workers, and an organization that described itself as the “Elementary Teachers' Headquarters” and claimed to have a membership of 10,000 in Shanghai alone succeeded in getting private schools re-designated as state-owned, which resulted in a wage increase of 70% at one such school, due to the benefits associated with state ownership for workers. The importance of subsidies in supporting working-class living standards was such that workers at almost every collective or private enterprise in Shanghai demanded that they be treated in the same way as workers at state enterprises as far as receiving benefits and being able to join a trade union was concerned, with state workers also demanding that the benefits which had been withdrawn as a result of the negative impacts of the Great Leap Forward be withdrawn, and legitimizing their demands by combining wage increases with requests that gave the appearance of wanting to participate in the non-economic aspects of the Cultural Revolution, such as fees to exchange revolutionary experiences, produce armbands, buy broadcasting equipment, and so on. Perry goes on to show that the wage increases gained by workers generated immediate increases in consumption, reflecting the extent to which consumption had been repressed during the preceding decades in order to sustain a high level of accumulation, such that, from January 1st to the 8th of the same month, Shanghai's largest department store experienced a growth in sales of 36.3% over the same period of the previous year, with purchases of bicycles and watches being particularly prominent, but by far the most impressive manifestation of economism in the sphere of consumption was the seizure of housing, which was carried out under the pretext of expelling “capitalist roaders”, “four pests”, and “reactionary authorities”, further affirming the ability of workers to manipulate the language of the state.
It is highly significant that the process of forcing cadres to make concessions caused considerable disruption to the economy, provoking opposition not only from the national leadership, but also from the rebel leaders, including Wang Hongwen himself, indicating that it is wrong as Meisner does to treat economism and the emergence of rebel organizations as basically the same phenomenon. Sheehan reports that on the 9th of January, that is, immediately after the orgy of consumption in Shanghai, the WGH released an “Urgent Notice” which was published throughout the country as part of the People's Daily on the 12th and decreed that those who had sabotaged production would be arrested by the Public Security Bureau, “in accordance with the law”, that the participants were also guilty of having opposed Mao, that workers would no longer be allowed to share revolutionary experiences, that they would be made to repay the expense money they had used to travel to other work units and cities, that workers and cadres both had a duty to return to their original units and work for eight hours each day, that wages would be frozen, and that enterprise funds would no longer be used to make unauthorized payments to workers making “economistic” demands, which were attributed to the work of “revisionists”. The same author also notes that the rebel leaders made extensive use of students to enforce the backlash by making them serve as strike breakers in the event that workers refused to go back to their work units, and it is partly for this reason that there were radio reports in mid-January of students being attacked by workers in Guangzhou. This response on the part of the rebel leaders is relevant to the essay because it shows that elements of mass participation encountered opposition not only from those who had been in positions of power before the Cultural Revolution began but also those who had benefited from it and found themselves becoming part of the elite, Wang Hongwen being the clearest example of this tendency. The response to economism also embodied the formation of new power structures in Shanghai, and whilst these have been treated by some scholars as cases of “power seizures”, indicating a change in the balance of political power, a close examination reveals that they were actually part of the process of restoring production and order, even when these structures were later opposed by the leadership because they placed too much power in the hands of local rebels. Meisner points out that the Shanghai People's Commune had its leaders appointed by Beijing, and that Yao Wenyuan and Zhang Chunqiao used the PLA to enforce order in the name of the commune as long it was allowed to exist by the national leadership, and at the inauguration of the new structure in early January they stressed that they had the support of the army, whilst excluding their political opponents from planning and leadership - the implication being that challenging the organization would be met with armed force, and according to Lee, even before the commune came into being, the rebel leaders had managed to combat economism to some degree, by taking control of the Control Office of the Shanghai Railway Bureau, and putting the railway system into action, with conductors being sought out and pressured into working, and students being mobilized to man the ticket booths and entry points to the railway platforms. Meisner also reports that the slogan “all power to the commune” was frequently head in Shanghai in early 1967, indicating a genuine desire for more participatory forms of administration, but nonetheless, the commune was criticized as a form of “extreme democracy”, and Sheehan reports that from February onwards even the use of the term “commune” was banned by the national leadership, with the three-in-one combination model that had arisen in Heilongjiang being promoted as the only acceptable form of administration, due to the privileged role this model gave to both cadres and the PLA, in addition to mass organizations.
The events that followed signified that the national leadership was anxious to maintain control of the situation, and they enforced control not merely by means of administrative methods, such as the issuing of decrees, but through using the PLA an an instrument of domination and violence, this struggle culminating in the defeat of the radical forces in the early months of 1968, this point also signifying the end of the most relevant phase of the Cultural Revolution as far as the working class and this essay is concerned. There was an ideological element to the bureaucracy's efforts, as Meisner reports that in April the campaign against Liu Shaoqi was intensified in a futile attempt to divert the attention of workers away from the basic structure of Chinese society and towards a specific individual who could be cited as responsible for the injustices of the past, this narrowing taking place alongside an intensification of Mao's personality cult, and Zhou Enlai also made efforts to characterize 95% of the cadres as progressive in order to prevent further challenges to political stability, with this group being described as the “backbone of the struggle to seize power”, but the level of radical activity was such that only the PLA was able to resolve the struggles in favour of the elite. The role of the PLA encompassed semi-peaceful tactics, such as sending officials to local area to create broad “great revolutionary alliances” to diminish conflict, these alliances encompassing both conservative and radical organizations, but Sheehan reports that the PLA fundamentally relied on violence, and as such it rapidly banned a large umber of radical organizations, whose members were made to register with the municipal Public Security Bureau, and frequently subject to the same kind of penalties that had been used against those who had gone too far during previous campaigns, such as firing, transferring, the docking of pay, and, unlike past campaigns, struggle sessions. It is noteworthy that the PLA was told to support the left when it was allowed to intervene, but, for the leadership, this was understood to mean not the radical organizations but the conservatives, the latter being comprised of privileged workers, and in support of his argument that no-one amongst the national leadership had any illusions about what the PLA was being sent in to do, Lee points to the case of Fujian, where, when the August 29 Commune, representing the radicals, took control of the provincial Party Committee in January, it did not gain the official approval of the centre, but when the Revolutionary Rebel Committee, representing the conservatives, condemned the power seizure as a instance of “the bourgeois reactionary line” in February, it received the support of the PLA at a local level, who organized a mass rally in their support, and also the support of the centre, who printed their declaration in the People's Daily, and promptly ordered that the rebels be arrested. Walder agrees with this viewpoint by pointing out that it was mainly the radicals who were victimized during the “cleanse the class ranks” campaign, as well as subsequent initiatives such as the campaign to eliminate “May 16 elements” in 1968, but the persecution carried out by the PLA was not without resistance on the part of the radicals, as Meisner reports that in from April onwards there were wall posters in Beijing attacking Zhou Enlai as leader of red capitalist class, due to that individual's role in instigating the PLA's intervention, and restoring cadres, as well as physical attacks on state offices and ministries, particularly the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where radical Red Guards were said to have seized and destroyed secret documents, and demanded that Chen Yi be ousted, due to his role as a veteran PLA Marshal. This resistance and the factional violence associated with it was of such intensity that in April only 4 out of 27 provinces and autonomous regions apart from Shanghai and Beijing had set up officially approved revolutionary committees, and it was in order to eliminate the remnants of the radicals that, on September 5th, the radicals were instructed to return the arms that had been taken from the PLA, which was described as a “peerless people's army”, with Jiang Qing being given the task of announcing these decisions to the Chinese people, an opportunity she utilized opportunistically in order to renounce her past views and to declare that the radicals she has allegedly sided with before that point were actually members of a “typical counterrevolutionary organization”. Meisner reports that, alongside continuing and intensified military repression, the journal Red Flag, which had been one of the most hysteric proponents of radicalism up to that point, was ordered to cease publication, with the old generals figuring prominently on the podium alongside Mao on National Day, shortly before the Cultural Revolution Small Group itself came to an end in November. The legacy of the PLA's repression tells us that the political attitudes of the leadership towards mass participation were centered around fear of what would happen if radical workers were allowed to become too confident, and it is through the terror and persecution of this period that we can explain the death toll of the Cultural Revolution.
It was in this context that the radicals developed a coherent critique of the society that had existed since 1949 that did not centre around the idea of an otherwise egalitarian order being infiltrated or subverted by a small number of undefinable capitalist roaders. They did so through an organization termed Sheng-wu-lien, comprised of 20 smaller organizations, which was publicly denounced by Zhou Enlai, Jiang Qing, Chen Boda, and Kang Sheng on January 26th of 1968, at a rally of 100,000 people in Changsha, as a "counter-revolutionary organization", and on the same day as the rally, Hunan Daily published an editorial entitled 'Thoroughly Smash Sheng-wu-lien, a Counter-Revolutionary Big Hotch-Potch', and, on February 8th, Zhou Enlai personally instructed the Southern Daily to reproduce the editorial for mass consumption. Kang Sheng had also asserted in a speech two days before the mass rally that the organization had received some of Trotsky's works and developed its analysis on the basis of his ideas, and, to put it lightly, the reaction of the leadership suggests that the organization was viewed as a serious threat, at the highest levels of the Chinese state, and Sheehan reports that the organization had a broader impact beyond Hunan, by giving rise to a number of local organizations which shared the same analysis of Chinese society and received the same response from the state, such as the “5 August Thought Trend” in Guangdong. The basic thesis of the organization, as developed in the document 'Whither China?', was that China was a class society in which the cadres and government officials constituted a red capitalist class whose privileged depended on the exploitation of the proletariat and peasantry, and who had imposed revolutionary committees in order to prevent the working class from realizing the goal of the People's Commune of China, which could only be obtained through the destruction of the bureaucracy, and would, in the style of the Paris Commune, involve officials being democratically elected and subject to recall at all times. The PLA is regarded as different from the army that overthrew the KMT in 1949, and the situation in Hunan is characterized as one of dual power, in which the role of the provisional government is played by the provincial revolutionary committee, and Sheng-wu-lien is described as a “power organ of mass dictatorship”, the development of the former in place of the provincial party committee and military district command signifying a “superficial” change and a means by which the power of bureaucracy was restored after the liberating events of 1966, due to “basic social changes” not being fulfilled. Most importantly of all, Mao is identified as responsible for the imposition of revolutionary committees, and the writers of the document announce, as if to imply a conclusion, or perhaps as an indication of the ongoing development of their theory, that his behaviour is “something which the revolutionary people find it hard to understand”, although it is not made clear whether the authors regard Mao himself as a member of the bureaucracy they seek to overthrow. Cliff has noted that praise for Mao is a persistent feature of the document, and suggests that this may have been due to the threat of pre-publication censorship, but it is highly intriguing that at the end of their essay, having announced their goal of working-class democracy, the authors end the essay with the declaration “Long Live Mao Tse-tung-ism!”, in place of the more conventional honorific of “Long Live Chairman Mao!” and, whilst there is no evidence to confirm this either way, it is tempting to argue that this reflected a view that Mao himself was no longer considered a faithful adherent of Maoist principles, such was his deviation from the emancipatory principles of the Cultural Revolution. If so, the finale of 'Whither China?' is the ultimate example of Chinese workers transforming a state-sponsored ideology into a weapon that could be used to articulate their own struggle against the ruling elites.
This essay has shown many things with regard to mass participation and political attitudes. It has been shown that mass participation was rooted in the dissatisfaction of Chinese workers with the prevailing order, and that divisions between different groups of workers, as examined through Walder's model of political networks, were also central in shaping attitudes and political behaviour. It has been shown that mass participation embodied multiple forms and that some of these forms were more all-encompassing than others, with economism being the movement that can be most accurately characterized as involving the whole of the working class. Furthermore, it has shown that Chinese workers were not unthinking instruments of factions, but demonstrated a remarkable capacity to use elements of elite ideology to their own advantage. With regard to the elite, it has been shown that the Cultural Revolution continued previous methods insofar as other campaigns had also involved mass participation, but that, unlike these campaigns, the Cultural Revolution posed a critical challenge to the legitimacy of the status quo, eventually resulting in the restoration of authority by violent means. In essence, the experience of mass participation demonstrates that China was a society rooted in class antagonisms, with these antagonisms forming the basis of divergent interests and attitudes. The Cultural Revolution was instigated by Mao but he was also its Bonaparte, and the contradictory nature of this event and indeed Mao as an individual can be understood as a reflection of the Chinese Revolution as a whole – it was an event and a process that signified the abolition of intense forms of oppression, but which ultimately instituted a new form of class oppression, leaving the working population's hunger for far-reaching change unfulfilled.