1. Traditional Chinese Social Structure, c. 1949
Land and labor
Village and clan

2. Why was land reform such a crucial question for the revolutionaries?
Why was it so difficult?

3. Example: Gao village, (Hunan) 1949:
280 mu (46 acres) for 20 households
1 landlord, 45 mu (7.4 ac.)
1 rich peasant, 33 mu (5.4 ac.)
Average middle peasant: 13.8 mu (2.3 ac.)
Average poor peasant: 6 mu (1 ac.)

4. “Dig out the rotten root of feudalism”
Who depends upon whom for a living?
Why are the poor poor and the rich rich?
Should rent be paid to the landlords?
(issues raised at organizing meetings for land reform; Hinton, 1966: 128)

5. Why were these questions so difficult?
Land and labor linked to clan system
Clan structure shaped village life
Relative autonomy of clan/village created basis of solidarity vs. outsiders, other clans and villages
Religious ideology (esp. ancestor worship and Confucianism) supported clan structure

6. Clan power
Small Gao village could unite with larger Gao village nearby
Within clan, dominant branch or family could control more land
“Feudal” exploitation obscured by religious ideology (Gao’s landlord taught Confucianism)
Dilemma for communists: how to weaken this structure while maintaining peasant support

7. Mao Zedong to the Political Consultative Congress, Sept. 11, 1949
The People’s Republic
“We have stood up.”
Mao Zedong to the Political Consultative Congress, Sept. 11, 1949

8. What was the structure of the new state?
“people’s democratic dictatorship”– (“New Democracy”)
Control of key industries (like social democracy-style socialism)
Democratic centralism in CCP
Democratic centralism in National People’s Congress

9. State structure Party structure (Atlas, #21)
State structure (Atlas, #19)

10. State structure (simplified by Shafer)
Chinese Communist Party
People’s Liberation Army
State Council
National Peoples Congress
Judiciary
CPPCC
People (in mass organizations, social institutions)

11. CPPCC org chart

12. Cadre system Inherited from Republic, which revised imperial structure
Li: “state technocrats” (37)
Even more power under Jiang Jieshi
Includes (Li: 48):
government officials
military officers
managers of state-owned or even large private corporations
intellectuals

13. Immediate tasks: Land reform Marriage law “Resist America, Aid Korea”
Suppression of counterrevolutionaries
Thought reform
Three-Anti’s and Five-Anti’s (anti-corruption)

14. How were they carried out?
Why these campaigns?
How were they carried out?

15. What was the “deep contradiction”?
Dietrich: institutional development vs. revolutionary transformation
Bureaucracy vs. mass mobilization
Rationalization (development) vs. emotion (revolutionary romanticism)
Benson: nationalism and socialism

16. 1953: Stalin dies

17. Socialist transition: First Five-Year Plan (1953-1957)
Bourgeois stage “abruptly terminated”? (Meisner, p. 108)
Soviet “aid”—with strings; loans with interest (Cf. Dietrich, p. 85, 87)
Negative lessons from USSR collectivization
Maoist “peasant socialism”: first, mutual aid teams, then “lower” Agricultural Producers Cooperatives (APCs), then…

18. First five-year plan
Soviet aid actually minimal; 3% of total investment
But “a drive based on the wholesale adoption of Stalinist methods” (Meisner: 109)
Growth impressive; % rate higher than goal (14.7%) (Meisner: )
“a significant and stable modern industrial base” (ibid)
But social and economic costs to peasants

19. Contradictions in First Five-Year Plan
Two line struggle: Mao vs. “handwringers;” collectivization vs. “deep” private property concept; “old revolutionaries” vs. “new cadres”
“one-man management” vs. socialist “new man”
Bureaucratization vs. revolutionary transformation
Also reflected in education: “indoctrination” vs. bureaucratic elitism (examination system)

20. High Tide 1955: caution prevails in Politburo, APCs dissolved
Mao goes to masses and lower levels, predicts “imminent” mass movement for socialism
Cadres investigate, enthusiastic villages held up as examples

21. Relations vs. forces Mao: revolutionize relations of production first
Forces of production will follow
Opponents argue forces first

22. Social forces of production New forces of production
Base-Superstructure
Superstructure
Ideas, ideology, institutions
Social reproduction
New superstructure
Class struggle
Revolution
Social forces of production
Relations of production
Means of production
New forces of production

23. Socialist transition: High Tide
Campaign turns to industry; even more complete reorganization
By 1956, almost entire country in socialist transition

24. Socialist transition: Hundred Flowers
Khruschev’s criticism of Stalin opens new possibilities in Third International
Mao, holding firmly to mass line, advocates “big democracy”—let one hundred flowers bloom
“On the correct handling..“

25. Why the hundred flowers campaign?
“A vast and routinized bureaucratic apparatus…” (Meisner, 170)
Note the role of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in the Party at that moment
Who does Mao turn to, to counter that?
Contradiction between leadership and the led
Mao: “…question whether socialism or capitalism will win is still not settled.”

26. Who turned the flowers into poisonous weeds?
One Hundred Flowers
Who turned the flowers into poisonous weeds?