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Class Conflict and the Vocabulary of Social Analysis in China Author(s): Richard Curt Kraus Source: The China Quarterly, No. 69 (Mar., 1977), pp. 54-74 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the School of Oriental and African Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/653149 Accessed: 22-04-2018 20:52 UTC

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Class Conflict and the Vocabulary of Social Analysis in China Richard Curt Kraus

Western curiosity about the distribution of inequalities in contemporary China is not easily satisfied. The most obvious impediment to our under- standing is that the government of the People's Republic does not publish even the most elementary social statistics, so that our efforts to gauge the shape of Chinese social stratification are by necessity impres- sionistic and often unsatisfying. The best recent assessment, offered in this journal by Martin King Whyte, draws upon an impressive (and an imaginatively motley) array of sources in support of well-reasoned, yet tantalizingly tentative conclusions.l

The Chinese media, of course, are full of discussions of class relations and inequality, and Whyte demonstrates that much can be learned from them. But even if we resign ourselves for the while to dependence upon such unstatistical and highly politicized information, judiciously supple- menting it with nuggets culled from travellers' reports and with the seasoned wisdom of foreign experts, some less immediately apparent difficulties emerge to confuse our comprehension of social inequality in China.

These Chinese discussions often seem rather opaque to western eyes because of an apparent contradiction in the language of social analysis which they employ. On one hand, studies such as Whyte's suggest that inequality in China is fluid, that power and prosperity have not remained frozen since Liberation. And this dynamic character of Chinese inequality is conveyed in even the most cursory reading of Mao Tse-tung's post-Liberation writings and speeches. Counter to this impression of movement, however, is a more static image deriving from the continuity of the vocabulary by which China's leaders consider issues of class conflict.

A central feature of contemporary discussions of Chinese society by the Communist Party is the insistence that China is experiencing a

* An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Midwest Seminar on Modem China. Research support was provided by the East Asian Institute and the Research Institute on Communist Affairs (now the Research Institute on International Change) of Columbia University, and by the Center for Asian Studies of the University of Illinois.

1. " Inequality and stratification in the People's Republic of China," The China Quarterly (CQ), No. 64 (1975).

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Class Conflict and the Vocabulary of Social Analysis in China

complex and protracted struggle among hostile classes. What is startling about this view is not that it is so similar to the analysis made at the time of Liberation, but that the class forces said to participate in this conflict are also the same: workers, peasants, bourgeoisie, and landlords. The Party's attention to workers and peasants is not surprising, but continuing references to such classes as landlords and bourgeoisie have an oddly archaic ring to them.

After all, a full generation has passed since Liberation, and in that time agricultural collectivization supposedly has eliminated the eco- nomic basis for landlord status, just as the socialist transformation of industry, by nationalizing private capital, seemingly has destroyed the foundation of the bourgeoisie. These restrictions on private property are only part of an imposing array of changes which have left contemporary China a society markedly different from the one in which the Communist Party attained power in 1949.

To be sure, one does not read very much about compradores or enlightened gentry now and it is certainly not my intention to suggest that the language of class analysis has remained completely unaltered since 1949. Yet the persistence of a class vocabulary designed for application to a pre-socialist society is striking, and perhaps obscures as much for the western reader as it clarifies. Westerners are often left

with a gnawing suspicion that these analyses are not serious ones. Socialist China surely cannot in fact be rent by the fissures which characterized a society in which land and capital were privately owned. One wonders if the continued reliance upon a class terminology asso- ciated with pre-socialist institutions is a case of Party nostalgia for a revolution increasingly distant in time, rather than a determined effort to identify the social forces which underly the changing stratification order in the People's Republic.

In the following pages I will argue that these social analyses are seriously offered, that they do take account of social changes since Liberation, and that in order to understand the retention of old cate- gories of analysis it is necessary to consider them in the light of newly emerging tensions of social inequality.

The System of Class Designations from Liberation to The 10th Plenum (1949-62)

Throughout the long civil war, the Communist Party insisted that victory could be achieved only through a proper analysis of the classes of Chinese society. After Liberation, as the Party attempted to strike the roots of revolution deeper into Chinese society, it again relied upon Marxist class theory, this time identifying each individual by class position. These class designations (chieh-chi ch'eng-fen, sometimes translated as "class status") were assigned to individual Chinese in the series of campaigns which accompanied and followed Liberation.

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The determination of class designations for urban residents is still poorly understood, but the procedures utilized in the countryside, which included the participation of the peasants undergoing identification, have been described in various accounts of land reform.2

The class designations were in fact the names of strata within the classes of Chinese society. In the case of the rural areas, concrete definitions and a guide to their application were published to assist cadres working in land reform.3 These class designations included the rural categories with which we are most familiar - landlord, rich peasant, well-to-do middle peasant, poor peasant, hired agricultural labourer - all defined in terms of their relationship to the means of production. A few categories, however, seem less obviously tied to one's position in the production process, such as revolutionary armyman or dependant of revolutionary martyr. Urban class designations seem also generally to have relied upon a means of production test, as in indus- trial capitalist, handicraft worker, or small pedlar, but variants such as student or urban pauper are more difficult to relate to conventional Marxist concepts.

Although the complexity of this system of class identifications rendered it difficult to apply by occasionally unsophisticated cadres, it was taken by the Party as a necessary adjunct to policies of social transformation through mass mobilization: by identifying a person's place in the class structure, one could more readily answer Mao's questions, "Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? "4 By the end of 1952, with the completion of land reform in the countryside and the "five-anti" campaign in the cities, the great majority of the Chinese population had been classified into more than 60 class desig- nations.5 The fact that each Chinese could identify his or her class meant that class in China was given a concreteness, a degree of specificity which has been unusual in the west.

But this elaborate system fell surprisingly quickly into a state of disrepair, as the class designations became increasingly irrelevant to new

2. A brief description is in Chao Kuo-chun, Agrarian Policy of the Chinese Communist Party 1921-1959 (Bombay: Asian Publishing House, 1960), pp. 122- 24. A more detailed account is William Hinton's Fanshen (New York: Vintage Books, 1968).

3. "Decisions concerning the differentiation of class status in the country- side," in Albert P. Blaustein (ed.), Fundamental Legal Documents of Communist China (South Hackensack, N.J.: Fred B. Rothman and Co., 1962), pp. 290-324.

4. These of course are the opening words of Mao's "Analysis of the classes in Chinese society," and the first lines in the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967).

5. Among the exceptions were inhabitants of non-Han areas which were exempted from land reform, as well as persons in some districts where land reform was never carried out. See the "Revised later ten points of 1964," in Richard Baum and Frederick C. Teiwes, Ssu-Ch'ing: The Socialist Education Movement of 1962-1966 (Berkeley: University of California, Center for Chinese Studies, 1968), p. 110.

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Class Conflict and the Vocabulary of Social Analysis in China

patterns emerging in the stratification of Chinese society. This issue became acute with the socialist transformation of 1955-56. By limiting the role of private property, the collectivization of agriculture and the nationalization of industry clearly undermined the definitions upon which the class designations had been based.6 The Party's class analysis had been designed to promote socio-economic transformation, but when such change followed, the analysis required rethinking. Discovering that its neat but static categories were at odds with the changing shape of Chinese society, the Party was faced with three choices: modifying the class designations in order to bring them up to date, insisting upon the continued relevance of post-Liberation class categories, or ignoring them.

Updating the class designations was an unattractive course to the Party leaders. First, there was the danger that China might be plunged into a bitter struggle, as those who had fared well since land reform would resist being placed in less favourable class categories.7 Secondly, there was the very fundamental question of what standards could be used to draw classes in the absence of significant differences in property holdings. To reclassify the Chinese population would have required theoretical innovations in Marxism which Mao and his associates in the

mid-1950s were not prepared to propose.

6. Limited, but economically significant holdings were retained for several years in private hands, especially in agriculture, where private plots were an issue throughout the next decade. Trees, tools and livestock were also often under private ownership, with consequences for rural income patterns. On this subject, see Kenneth R. Walker, Planning in Chinese Agriculture: Socialization and the Private Sector, 1956-1962 (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1965). In industry, former capitalists were given shares in the newly nationalized firms, the " public-private joint enterprises." These shares did return interest at a fixed rate and were held until 1967. See Mao Tse-tung's comments at a meeting of business representatives in 1956, in Miscellany of Mao Tse-tung Thought, Joint Publications Research Service (hereafter JPRS 61269-1 and 61269-2, pp. 41-45. See also Audrey Donnethorne, China's Economic System (New York: Praeger, 1967), pp. 145-47. In spite of these remnants of private ownership of the means of production, the undermining of the ch'eng-fen system was nonetheless severe. Private ownership after 1956 existed only in a markedly truncated form.

7. T'ao Chu observed in 1955 that more rural Party members had risen in economic status than had non-Party peasants, a phenomenon which further limited the Party's incentive to reclassify the populace, for such a policy would have worked to the disadvantage of the Party's own rural cadres. See T'ao Chu, "The great development of agricultural co-operativization in the new areas and the problem of guaranteeing quality," Hsueh-hsi (Study), No. 12 (1955), p. 8. Note also Mao Tse-tung's " Introductory note to how the dominant position passed from the middle peasants to the poor peasants in the Wutung agricultural pro- ducers' co-operative of Kaoshan township, Changsha county," in which he cautions that the Party's new interest in dividing upper and lower middle peasants is an analytical procedure, which " does not mean undertaking another differentiation of classes in the rural areas," a fact which should be publicly explained to the peasants. Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1971), p. 427.

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The possibility of insisting upon the continued relevance of the existing class designations was somewhat more straightforward. For instance, there were capitalists who demanded that they be considered as workers after the socialization of their factories. The Party was quick to state that ideological reform must accompany economic change, and that such remoulding took time, typically lagging behind immediate economic transformations. Former capitalists were still to be identified by their old class designations.8

Complementing this trend, however, was another, somewhat contra- dictory one: a general tendency to downplay the class designations altogether. In the year 1956, major leaders of the Party agreed that class struggle was diminishing in China, that the development of socialist institutions had reduced, but not eliminated, the menace pre- sented by the once powerful landlords and bourgeoisie.9 The clearest indication of this changing view of class was Teng Hsiao-p'ing's speech at the Eighth National Congress of the Party, in which he averred that the old system of class designations "has lost or is losing its original significance." 10

Such a diminution of the salience of class categories was enhanced by the emergence of alternative institutions in which much of the Chinese population was more meaningfully ranked. Most prominent were the various grading systems which were adopted in 1955-56 to rank the members of such key sectors of society as soldiers, industrial workers and cadres.1l In keeping with this spirit, Mao offered a new analysis of the tensions in Chinese society, one which directed attention to broad contradictions, a concept which encompassed class differences, but went beyond them to include many non-class distinctions as well.12

To be sure, ideas of class struggle certainly did not lose their legiti- macy after socialist transformation. But in comparison to the profusion of discussions of class struggle in more recent years, towards the end of a decade of rule, Party interest in class categories was at its nadir.13

8. See K'ang Min, "Can classes naturally be transformed? " Chin-lin jih-pao (Kirin Daily) 16 November 1957; and Li Kuang-i, "How to understand correctly the problem of capitalists' 'taking off hats,' " Shih-shih shou-ts'e (Current Afairs Handbook), No. 24 (25 December 1956), pp. 17-19.

9. See especially Liu Shao-ch'i's Political Report in Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Vol. 1 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1956), p. 15. For a later acknowledgment by Mao that he had agreed with Liu in 1956, see Long Live Mao Tse-tung Thought, translated in Current Background, No. 891 (8 October 1969), p. 72.

10. Jen-min jih-pao, 18 September 1956. 11. See A. Doak Barnett, Cadres, Bureaucracy, and Political Power in Com-

munist China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), especially pp. 39-47 and 190-93. See also Ezra F. Vogel, " From revolutionary to semi-bureaucrat: the ' regularization' of cadres," CQ, No. 29 (1967), pp. 36-60.

12. Mao, "On the correct handling of contradictions among the people," Selected Readings, pp. 432-79.

13. An article in Hsiieh-hsi magazine posed the question, "Must we still use

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Class Conflict and the Vocabulary of Social Analysis in China

This situation was racially altered, however, at the 1962 10th Plenum of the Central Committee, where Mao Tse-tung urged the restoration of class as a major organizing principle for social change. The Maoist slogan which issued from this meeting was " Never forget class struggle." Readers of the Chinese press are aware that this recommendation seemingly has been followed, but that it often is difficult to specify what the content of "class" in socialist China might be. Our under- standing of the contemporary significance of class may be increased if we recognize that class, like many other politically charged words, can mean different things to different actors. If this is so, and the content of class is variable, then the search for a single definition of class may be misdirected.

Some of the ambiguities surrounding the use of the language of class struggle in socialist China may be reduced by distinguishing three common uses to which it has been put. The idea of class struggle has been employed as a weapon by: (1) the Party against the old bour- geoisie and landlords, losers of the civil war; (2) Maoists against the emergence of newly privileged groups within the Party; (3) Party bureaucrats eager to obscure the existence of a privileged stratum.

Class Conflict as a Weapon Against Formerly Privileged Groups

Perhaps the simplest explanation for the continued stress on class struggle so long after Liberation is an apparently widespread feeling within the Party that the old enemy classes of landlords, rich peasants and bourgeoisie are still quite real, and pose a threat to the security of socialism in China.

And it indeed is not difficult to imagine that many of those who belonged to classes dislodged from positions of power might not be pleased with the socialization of their means of production. Emigrants from China whom I interviewed in Hong Kong in 1972, most of whom were themselves from suspect classes, discussed the extensive discontent among landlord and rich peasant families, some even suggesting that there might be support for a restoration of the old regime. Documentary accounts of landlord glee in anticipation of a 1962 invasion by Chiang Kai-shek gain plausibility in the light of such views.14 The ability of

the method of class analysis in handling contradictions among the people? " See the article by this title by Wen Chih-ta in No. 12 (1958), p. 32. What is surprising is not the affirmative answer given, but the fact that such a question could even be raised. By 1962, as Mao was placing class again high on the agenda of the Party, there were open attacks on the applicability of the idea of class struggle. See Harold Kahn and Albert Feuerwerker, "The ideology of scholarship: China's new historiography," in Feuerwerker (ed.), History in Communist China (Cam- bridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968), pp. 2-3.

14. See Hung Hsueh-shih, "The reactionary theory of 'combining two into one' as seen in Anhwei rural class struggle," Hung-ch'i (Red Flag), Nos. 23-24 (December), in JPRS, 28359 (19 January 1965), p. 45; Han Feng-chen, "How to

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such persons to alter China's socialist course may be questionable, but the existence of Kuomintang espionage and of other hostile forces beyond China's borders makes the Party's fear of these classes more realistic than outsiders sometimes imagine.

From the Party's perspective, this threat is made more serious by the possible influence of former landlords and capitalists upon China's cultural, ideological and institutional superstructure. Party policy pre- sumes that this superstructure is more difficult to change than the socio- economic relations which generated it. Thus, the end of private property is not enough: bourgeois and landlord/rich peasant ways have roots deep in society, which must systematically be extirpated. The implication of such an analysis is that even after all of the persons who were once members of the enemy classes have died, their influence will still be felt. Given this belief, those bourgeois and landlord persons still living must be treated with special concern, lest they breathe new vigour into the decaying ideologies of their classes.

The experience of persons from the defeated classes of the Chinese civil war helps describe the parameters of the much-noted Party tradition of valuing ideological transformation above class origins. One cannot simply change class at will. Voluntarism has its limits, or else former landlords and capitalists would long ago have willed themselves into the more favoured proletariat.

Insofar as the revival of interest in class conflict was and has

been directed towards the members of China's overthrown ruling classes, there has been a concommitant renewal of attention to the system of class designations. In part, this is because ordinary Chinese had forgotten once obvious distinctions which had readily identified the class enemy:

After the land reform, the landed elements did not have any land for rent: nor could they depend upon exploiting the peasants for their livelihood. Instead they were required to earn their livelihood through their own labor. Some persons were easily confused by this phenomenon and errone- ously thought that landlords and peasants had become the same.15

But attention to the old class designations was also necessary if the revolutionary classes were to be organized against their continuing adversaries. Some urgency was given to the need to update class desig- nations during the Socialist Education Movement of 1962-66, as the Party moved to establish poor and lower-middle peasant associations, which were to give organizational structure to the renewal of rural class struggle. If the bad classes were to be supervised, the good ones must be organized. The need to determine who was eligible for membership in these bodies led many cadres, according to one Hong Kong informant,

carry out class education of young children," Chung-kuo ch'ing-nien (Chinese Youth (1 August 1964); C. S. Chen (ed.), Rural People's Communes in Lienchiang, (Stanford: Hoover Institution Publications, 1969) No. 83, pp. 96-98.

15. Huang Hsueh-shih, "The reactionary theory of 'combining two into one' as seen in Anhwei rural class struggle," p. 44.

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Class Conflict and the Vocabulary of Social Analysis in China

to expect a general reclassification of the whole rural population prior to the conclusion of the Socialist Education Movement. Such a course

eventually was demanded in 1964. Likening this Movement to Land Reform, it was stated that:

Since there is widespread confusion about class designations in the country- side, it is necessary to carry out a clarification of class designation as a part of the work of the Socialist Education Movement. The class desig- nation of each rural household should be examined and classified after full

discussion by the masses, and a class dossier should be established.16

Such a broad revision of class designations never took place.17 This failure no doubt involves the complex and still shadowy politics of the Socialist Education Movement,18 but also stems from the same factor which impeded reclassification in the 1950s: there are no clear standards by which to assign these old class names to the inhabitants of a society in which private property is no longer a major element in social differentiation. Mao had also insisted that "class identifications must

also be drawn in the cities." Significantly, however, he was uncertain about how they might be determined: "As to how they should be drawn certain criteria should be formulated when we come to do this work in the future." 19

In the absence of a new classification, renewal of attention to class

designations made it clear that whatever the designations represented, they were not an adequate index to on-going economic position in Chinese society. Rural income groups, for example, had come to be shaped by factors other than property ownership, such as the number of able-bodied workers in a family.20 But in spite of any close fit between class designation and contemporary economic position, few in the Party have argued since 1962 that the old class categories should be forgotten.

16. Baum and Teiwes, Ssu-Ch'ing, p. 110. I have slightly modified the trans- lation after comparison with the Chinese text.

17. Indications of alterations of class designation are quite fragmentary, but the limited evidence suggests the possibility of unsystematic, local decisions for modification. Widescale reclassification of large numbers of people would surely better be known. Similarly, there had been no general reclassification during the 1950s, in spite of regulations which permitted them. In 1956 it was claimed that 80-5 , of the landlords and rich peasants of Ch'ang-chin Special District of Shansi had changed their designations. Jen-min jih-pao (People's Daily), 26 September 1956. But I have found no other evidence of such extensive modifica- tion of class designations, although other reports from Shansi and Kwangtung suggest smaller-scale changes. See Hsin-hua pan yueh-k'an (New China Semi- monthly), No. 3 (1957), pp. 66-67; and Shang-yu (Upstream), Nos. 17-18 (1959), p. 48.

18. Many shadowy areas have now been illuminated by Richard Baum, in Prelude to Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975).

19. Mao, Miscellany, p. 351. 20. On the complexity of rural income, see Whyte, "Inequality and strati-

fication," and William L. Parish Jr, " Socialism and the Chinese peasant family," Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. XXIV, No. 3 (May 1975).

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After all, the threat from landlords and capitalists is based not upon present economic status, but rests in the habits and values of an earlier, pre-socialist era.

In this perspective, the meaning of class struggle lies in the use of old class names as historical markers, indicating positions once held.21 It is important for the Party to know these positions because members of old classes can have an impact on the future development of the revolu- tion. The bourgeoisie and landlords are still enemies of the workers and peasants who overthrew them in the civil war. What has changed is that now the enemy classes are on the defensive, as they must fight a rear- guard action without the resources in private property which once enabled them to rule China. But in Party eyes, the conflict continues.

Class Conflict as a Weapon Against the Emergence of Newly Privileged Groups

Although most forces within the Party seem to agree on the danger posed by some of what Whyte calls China's "old classes," these classes do not appear to be sufficiently terrifying to account for the intensity of the attention paid to class conflict in the past decade and a half. The search for an explanation must be broadened by turning to Mao Tse-tung's attempt to cope with a different set of threats to the develop- ment of socialism. In Mao's perception, the chief peril comes from a new source: communist leaders who advocate policies which undermine the kind of socialism that Mao and his allies envisage. In his effort to deal analytically with this phenomenon, Mao has turned to the language of class analysis with which the Party has long been familiar.

Mao's view is that the remaining members of the old exploiting classes are being joined and supplanted by new class enemies:

In our country, the system of exploitation of man by man has been elimi- nated, and the economic foundation of the reactionary classes now are not as terrible as they were before. For this reason, we describe them as remnants of reactionary classes. We must, nevertheless, never ignore these remnants but continue to wage a struggle against them. In a socialist society, meanwhile, new elements of the bourgeoisie may emerge. Class and class struggle remain during the entire period of socialism. This class struggle is protracted, complex, and sometimes violent.22

Who are these "new elements of the bourgeoisie" who may come forth in socialist society? Although Mao was slow to identify them

21. Most recently this is being acknowledged in China's English-language publications, where class names are explained for foreign readers. For example, a note in Peking Review, Vol. 17, No. 34 (23 August 1974), p. 15, explains that "The term 'poor and lower-middle peasants' used in our articles does not imply their present economic conditions but refers to their class status during the land reform."

22. Mao, "Democratic centralism" (30 January 1962), in Chairman Mao's Selected Writings, transl. in JPRS, 50792 (23 June 1970), pp. 45-46.

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Class Conflict and the Vocabulary of Social Analysis in China

explicitly, as he developed his thoughts on class struggle it has become clear that the enemy he fears is a section of the Party bureau- cracy itself. Mao stated the proper goals of class struggle for the Socialist Education Movement, using terms applicable to the following Cultural Revolution as well: "The key point of this movement is to rectify those people in positions of authority within the Party who take the capitalist road." 23

An older Maoist hostility towards bureaucrats is now linked by the chairman to the concept of class struggle, as he attempts to grapple with developments which he has found profoundly disquieting. Early among these must have been the opposition to his policies which was led by P'eng Teh-huai at the Lushan plenum in 1959. Of this opposition, Mao concluded that:

The struggle that has arisen at Lushan is a class struggle. It is the continua- tion of the life-or-death struggle between the two great antagonists of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the process of the socialist revolution during the past decade.24

The analytical task which confronted Mao is to explain how fellow- Communists could become adversaries of the correct line, or as Mao asked of his enemies at Lushan, "why is it that only yesterday they were men of great merit, but today they become arch culprits?" 25

For such a problem the class designations are of little use, for the errant cadres usually are persons of impeccable class credentials. Mao was forced to develop a new analysis of class to explain this phenomenon. Although the degeneration of a revolutionary group, its estrangement from the masses, its usurpation of privilege and advocacy of non-egalitarian policies are not new themes in Marxist theory, Mao was perhaps the first communist leader in power to concern himself so deeply with them. Trotsky and Djilas, for instance, developed their critiques only after they had been removed from power.

In Mao's view the problem is not simply that Party bureaucrats form a new class, for if that were so, then Mao and his allies would belong to it as surely as their opponents. The danger is that such a class might emerge, developing distinct class interests and consciousness, and bequeathing its newly acquired privileges to its children. This may be observed in Mao's comment on a passage from a Soviet text on political economy:

On page 488 it says that in a socialist society, the position of man is only contingent upon labor and individual capacity. This is not necessarily so. The clever and the bright often arise from people who occupy low position, are despised by others, have suffered indignities, and are young. There is no exception to this in a socialist society. According to the laws of the old

23. Baum and Teiwes, Ssu-Ch'ing, p. 120. 24. Mao, "The origins of machine guns and mortars," (16 August 1959),

in Chairman Mao's Criticism of the Antiparty Clique, p. 73. 25. Mao, " The origins of machine guns and mortars," p. 74.

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society, the oppressed had a low culture, but they were more clever. On the other hand, the oppressors had a high culture, but they were more stupid. There is some danger of this in the high-salaried stratum of socialist society. People in this stratum have more culture and wider knowledge, but compared with people in the low-salaried stratum, they are more stupid. Precisely the children of our cadres are different from those of non-cadres.2';

If Mao feared a new social group, one which did not exist prior to the creation of socialist society, why did he refer to this group as bourgeois, which points backward to an earlier period in the course of the Chinese revolution? Was his goal to confuse the language of class analysis? In so far as Mao believed that such persons can bring about the restoration of capitalism in China, his characterization of the new class enemies as bourgeois is comprehensible. But this is not an adequate explanation. For other reasons, Mao in fact may well have sought to confuse the vocabulary of class analysis.

Mao's new interest in class struggle was ultimately nothing less than the development of a new theory of class relations, designed for applica- tion to socialist societies. This implies a recognition that Chinese Marxism must go beyond Marx, who fashioned a theory for capitalist society, but said surprisingly little about socialism.27 Mao was inhibited from clearly expressing his new approach, however, by the climate of Sino-Soviet relations. A hostile Soviet Union, always watching over Mao's shoulder, would be quick to stigmatize such theorizing as revisionist.28 The novelty of Mao's views thus often has been clouded, as Maoists have persisted in citing a safely classic definition of class, while they otherwise work towards replacing it.29

The use of words such as bourgeoisie carry additional advantages. Not only do they stress the links with earlier revolutionary efforts through their emotional connotations, but they are value-laden in the way that "communist" and "red" are in the United States. "Bourgeoisie baiting" puts Mao's opponents on the defensive, just as former adversaries of McCarthy and Nixon were once weakened by the

26. Mao, Miscellany, p. 306. Mao's comment about cadre children is clarified by another passage in this same work: "The children of our cadres are a source of deep concern to us. They have no experience in life and society. Yet they put on airs and think highly of themselves. We must educate them not to rely on their parents and on martyrs, but entirely on themselves," p. 273.

27. See, for instance, Mao's comments about Marx in Miscellany, pp. 99-199. 28. And this is what the Soviet Party did. Note the derision of Chinese

usages of class in "Open letter from the CPSU Central Committee to Party organizations and all Communists of the Soviet Union" (14 July 1963), in William E. Griffith, The Sino-Soviet Rift (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1964), p. 310. This is perhaps why so much of Mao's theorizing is first presented to private forums, often never publicly published, or else transmitted to the public in somewhat diluted form.

29. This definition is Lenin's, which may be found in Kung Cheng-yao. "Strengthening Party concept and accepting Party leadership," Hung-ch'i. No. 1 (1 January 1970), in SCMM, No. 672 (26 January 1970), p. 89.

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Class Conflict and the Vocabulary of Social Analysis in China

names employed against them. In these ways an old class language has been brought to bear against a new kind of class enemy.

As this enemy is new, by what standards may it be judged? Old class designations are irrelevant, but Mao's insistence that class struggle persists throughout the period of socialist society suggests that he had in mind some alternative criteria for class relations. Mao's solution

has been to turn from the economic base of society to its superstructure in searching for classes under conditions of socialism. This change of emphasis focuses attention not upon economic relationships, but upon political stance, upon behaviour which aids or deters the building of socialism in China. As expressed in the title of one China Youth Daily editorial, "The Party's class policy lays stress on deeds."30 Mao's "Instruction on the question of class differentiation" argues that " class designation and individual behaviour must be distinguished, with the more important being individual behaviour." The purpose of determin- ing classes "is to clean out the bad elements." In so doing, " the theory of considering class designation alone is incorrect." 31 A more recent formulation is more explicit in linking class to conduct.

According to the Marxist viewpoint of class struggle, the most important way of judging a representative of a particular class is to see the line and policies he pushes and the interests of the class he represents.32

Attention is directed to the struggle between two lines, which in recent years has been a special hallmark of the Maoist emphasis on behaviour:

Line struggle is the reflection within the Party of the class struggle in society. So long as classes, class contradictions and class struggle exist in society, there must be the struggle between two lines within the Party.33

By this doctrine, persons can serve classes other than those of their origin. This is of course a modern expression of an old tendency in Chinese Marxism, which recognizes Ithat individuals can transcend the class origins through ideological remoulding or ideological degeneration.34 But it is a current in Chinese Marxism which perhaps has never been so prominent. Mao recently has been credited with the teaching that class struggle in the superstructure is "in the last analysis, a matter of what ideological and political line is to be followed." 35 This is a distant

30. JPRS 36453 (13 July 1966), pp. 89-93. 31. Mao Tse-tung ssu-hsiang wan sui! (no place of publication: 1969), p. 602. 32. Writing Group of the Shantung Provincial Committee of the Chinese

Communist Party, "Adhere to the method of class analysis, correctly understand the struggle between the two lines," Hung-ch'i, No. 13 (4 December 1971), in SCMM, No. 719 (23 December 1971), p. 18.

33. "In branch construction one must grasp line education," Jen-min jih-pao, 26 February 1971.

34. See Donald Munro, "The malleability of man in Chinese Marxism," CQ, No. 48 (1971), pp. 609-40.

35. Li Chien, "Attach importance to the revolution in the superstructure," Peking Review (24 August 1973), p. 5.

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step from presuming that class analysis can rest on a simple calculation of property relations. As the situation of the now landless landlords suggests, however, it is far easier to change from a good class to a bad one than to move in the other direction.

It is this detachment of class categories from property which gives many class discussions in China a rather amorphous quality. The most colourful form of these discussions probably has been the vituperative language of the Cultural Revolution, in which one is hard-pressed to specify the relationship to the means of production of such class enemies as "ghosts and monsters," or " little reptiles" and "chameleons."

And there certainly have been many difficulties encountered in the application of this new theory of class struggle in socialist society. The factional conflicts of Red Guard groups demonstrated that the use of earlier class concepts was far simpler than the Cultural Revolution assignment of identifying correct revolutionary behaviour without benefit of concrete economic referents. The likely consequences of a person's behaviour may be an appropriate focus of interest for class analysis after socialization, but they are not easy to specify.

So subjective have class categories become in Maoist usage that Benjamin Schwartz questions whether they retain any objective content:

In fact "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat" have been transmuted in the Maoist universe into something like two pervasive fluids, one noxious and the other beneficial, which can find their lodgments anywhere.36

This focus on the subjective aspect of class language in China is certainly correct, but perhaps a bit harsh. Maoist efforts are an attempt to come to grips with a still-emergent class through a still-emergent theory. Mao's 1963 comment is seemingly applicable today: "Class struggle is still unpolished." 37

Perhaps Mao's approach is not such a radical departure from the Party's traditions, but rather an attempt to grapple with the old problem of inequality in a new social environment. Such continuity is suggested in Mao's updating of the famous opening words of his "Analysis of the classes in Chinese society ":

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution and it is likewise a question of the first importance for the great Cultural Revolution.38

In proposing a conception of class struggle which is not based upon property relationships, Mao has directed his attention away from the system of class designations. There is a strange and ill-defined inter- section between an emerging new theory of class struggle under socialism

36. Benjamin I. Schwartz, Communism and China: Ideology in Flux (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 21.

37. Mao, Miscellany, p. 316. 38. Quoted in " Never lose direction," Peking Ching-kang-shan (23 January

1967).

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Class Conflict and the Vocabuiary of Social Analysis in China

- which holds that property relations are no longer primary - and an old system of class designations, applied to almost all of the Chinese population, which is based on ownership patterns of an earlier day.

Here arises a point which needs elaboration: many Chinese seem still to view their society as one in which most people can be categorized as either winners or losers of the civil war. One of the ways in which the modifications in the ideology of class struggle may be visualized is to consider this perception of the fundamental cleavage of Chinese society. Immediately after Liberation, that cleavage seemed to be class-based, with workers and poor and lower-middle peasants (led by the Party) ascendent over the former exploiting classes:

Workers, poor and lower-middle peasants

Exploiting classes

This is the class cleavage which is expressed by the old class designations.

But by the early 1960s, Mao had concluded that this cleavage (or contradiction, to use Maoist terminology) was in some significant measure a relic of the past, that it was being superseded in salience by a new dichotomy. Unlike the Liberation-era cleavage I have just described, what I shall call the socialist cleavage is one in which new revolutionaries - defined by their behaviour in seeking to build socialism, are in conflict with new bourgeois elements, similarly defined by their support for policies which lead to capitalist restoration:

New revolutionaries

New bourgeois elements

The new revolutionaries may be drawn from all strata of society, although Mao expects workers and poor and lower-middle peasants to play leading roles. The new bourgeois elements, however, seem to come primarily from degenerate persons among those who have staffed the political structure erected by the Communists after 1949. In the dialectical reasoning of Chinese Marxism, there has been a division of one into two, as members of the winners category have been split into true revolutionaries and revisionists.

As a theoretical innovation, the new Maoist analysis has been denied clarity by the use of the same class terminology which was fashioned to describe the Liberation cleavage. But it is an innovation nonetheless, one which attempts to nudge class thinking away from the civil war heritage.39 This is perhaps politically astute, for the battles of land reform and socialization are of little relevance to the majority of China's

39. This innovation has been given new theoretical depth in the recent dis- cussion of "bourgeois right." See Yao Wen-yuan's " On the social basis of the Lin Piao anti-Party clique," Peking Review, Vol. 18, No. 10 (7 March 1975), pp. 5-10; and Chang Chun-chiao, "On exercising all-round dictatorship over the bourgeoisie," Peking Review, Vol. 18, No. 14 (4 April 1975), pp. 5-11.

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population born since Liberation. And the substitution of behaviour for property relations, for all its shortcomings, offers a way in which both reformed capitalist and malevolent poor peasant may be considered in terms meaningful to the problems of socialist construction.

Class Conflict as a Weapon for Masking a Newly Privileged Stratum

The tension between an evolving Maoist theory of class struggle in socialist society and the old class designations, residues of an earlier class conception, has been chronic, but subtle. This confrontation between two theories of class has lacked dramatic impact both because the Maoists have chosen to express their new approach in the language of Marxist tradition, and because they feel that the old class enemies are sufficiently threatening that the class designations, and the Liberation cleavage they represent, cannot be disregarded completely. Nonetheless, in the Maoist perspective, class struggle directed against the old enemies of socialism, rather than the new ones, has acquired a certain mustiness.

This tension has been exploited by many of those cadres who have been accused by Maoists of taking the capitalist road. Under fire, they have learned that popular awareness of the emergence of the socialist cleavage can be obscured by insisting upon the continued primary significance of the class categories associated with the Liberation cleavage.

This possibility has been enhanced by the complexity of the Maoist alternative to class designations. Amidst the pressures of political battle, many Chinese have found reliance upon these old and familiar categories to afford them a surer footing than can be secured by attempting the stickier task of evaluating political behaviour. In this way it is necessary merely to attack already defeated class enemies, those persons who lost long ago in the civil war. The Maoist approach demands the more delicate job of speaking out about the conduct of one's peers and superiors.

Among the ironies of the politics of class struggle in China is that many of the measures taken to increase popular awareness of the role of class - which must be raised if Mao's new approach is to be success- ful - have in fact reinforced the class designations of the Liberation cleavage.

The Liberation Army News has identified one aspect of the class problem:

Born under the red flag and brought up in blissful circumstances, young soldiers do not know the miseries of the old society, nor do they know what class oppression, class exploitation, and class struggle mean.40

Many features of " never forgetting class struggle " which are intended to remedy this shortcoming, such as programmes for remembering past

40. JPRS, 36435 (13 July 1966), p. 69.

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Class Conflict and the Vocabulary of Social Analysis in China

bitterness and the organization of poor and lower-middle peasant associations, are still inherently backward looking. They perform a conservative function by perpetuating a perception of social structure from the days immediately following Liberation, thus undermining the already tenuous clarity of the alternative model of social cleavage upon which Mao's developing theory is based.

Especially in the countryside have class designations been important in setting the boundaries for social intercourse. The range of discrimina- tions applied to former landlords and rich peasants (who together with counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists constitute the "five- category elements") seems to vary greatly. At a minimum it seems typically to include undervaluation of work points (especially in the 1960s) and a degree of social isolation from the poor and lower-middle peasant majority. The other extreme is represented by one area in North China, where, in the heat of the Cultural Revolution, "In ten brigades, the landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and rightists and their children, including babies, were killed in one day." 41

The savagery of this incident is by all indications unusual. In a rather lurid manner, however, it suggests a new consideration to be added to the already complex mix of factors which keeps ideas of class struggle current in China. The class designations of the Liberation cleavage are, in practice, inheritable. Thus to destroy physically the unfortunate class enemies of the afore-mentioned 10 brigades, it was necessary to massacre their children as well.

When the class struggle of the Liberation cleavage is passed on to the second generation, young people are identified by their "family backgrounds"- which consists of their fathers' post-Liberation class designation. Family background is not a new idea, but it has loomed in importance since the early 1960s. By that time there existed a critical mass of youth, born since Liberation but only vaguely incorporated into the system of class designations.

In the charged environment of the early Cultural Revolution, when Mao's ideas about class were not well understood, the tendency of many adults to stress class designation rather than the trickier standard of behaviour often meant that young people were judged by their family backgrounds and classified accordingly as revolutionaries or reactionaries. This development was strenuously opposed by many young people whose fathers were not from good categories.42 It was also

41. The words are from Hsieh Fu-chih's denunciation of this incident, in "Summary of proceedings of 13th plenum of Peking municipal revolutionary committee " (15 May), Canton Wen-ko t'ung-hsun (Cultural Revolution Bulletin), No. 16 (July 1968), in Survey of the China Mainland Press, No. 4225 (25 July 1968), pp. 12-13.

42. See, for instance, "The theory of famiy background," by the Peking research group on family background, in Chung-hsueh wen-ko pao (Middle School Cultural Revolution News) (special edition) (February 1967).

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opposed by Mao Tse-tung, who stressed that current behaviour, not family heritage, must be used to judge revolutionary credentials:

The question is, do you have that class standpoint of your original back- ground, or do you have a changed class standpoint, that is, do you stand on the side of the workers and the poor and lower-middle peasants? You must both avoid sectarianism and unite with the majority: you must even unite with a section of the landlords and the rich peasantry; you must unite with the children of landlords and rich peasants. ... If you only appraise family background, then neither Marx, Engels, Lenin nor Stalin would make it.43

Opposing Mao's view were conservative Red Guards, often children of important cadres, who advocated the doctrine of "natural redness." This view held that only children of the " five red categories" (workers, poor and lower-middle peasants, revolutionary cadres, revolutionary armymen, and revolutionary martyrs) should be permitted to participate in the Cultural Revolution. Children of parents with other class designations were to be excluded.

Red Guard groups so constituted were more often interested in preserving the status of their members (and of their parents) than in launching a radical attack upon social institutions. Their important fathers and mothers, often beleaguered in the opening period of the Cultural Revolution, used their children's organizations as lines of defence against those Red Guards who were more conscientiously attack- ing "reactionary power-holders." Natural redness was encouraged by many cadres under attack from the Maoists, as they endeavoured to manipulate Red Guard politics in order to protect their positions. Note the words of Chia Ch'i-un, first Party secretary of Kweichow:

You are all sons and daughters of the five Red categories; the regime relies on you for protection .... Many of those in the liaison teams [from Peking and other provinces that came to Kweichow] have bad backgrounds. Before, we battled with their parents and established our regime. Today, obviously, their parents are not reconciled to this and are using their children to struggle against us. You must battle against them.44

The two orientations towards family background are related to the two models of social cleavage suggested above. Cadres such as Chia, finding themselves at the bottom of the socialist cleavage, had a powerful interest in perpetuating the Liberation cleavage as the dominant image of Chinese class relations. As such power-holders were drawn from the

43. Mao, Wan sui (1969), pp. 602-603. 44. Quoted in Parris H. Chang, "Provincial Party leaders' strategies for

survival during the Cultural Revolution," in Robert A. Scalapino (ed.), Elites in the People's Republic of China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972), p. 515. For an account of a similar effort to protect T'an Chen-lin in February 1967, see "T'an Chen-lin stirs up the 'February black wind' in the agricultural departments," Peking Chin-chun pao (Marching Paper), 20 March 1972, in Survey of the China Mainland Press, Supplement, No. 178 (18 April 1967), pp. 35-36.

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Class Conflict and the Vocabulary of Social Analysis in China

cleavage's superior category, they did not object to sustained attention to the apparatus of class designations and its family background heritage. Many who insisted on the continuing salience of the division between winners and losers of the civil war were consciously masking other social differences. Similarly, the children of members of the former exploiting classes had an obvious stake in encouraging the shift from the Liberation to the socialist model, as they were clearly disadvantaged by the former, but at least had a chance in joining the better half of the polarity in the latter.

For Mao, the royalist backlash of 1966 raised the threat that his enemies within the Party, in defending themselves, might further con- solidate the outmoded Liberation cleavage. If this is so, Maoist harsh- ness towards the doctrine of natural redness was inspired not by kind feelings towards a group of young persons being wronged, but rather by the demands of his revised perception of China's primary social contradiction. If one seeks to have the socialist cleavage supplant its predecessor in popular consciousness, it will not do to advocate hound- ing the children of a long-defeated enemy. But if one feels under attack as the negative member of a new contradiction (as did many Party bureaucrats), then by all means it is imperative to discourage popular recognition of this cleavage by persisting in fighting an old battle in which glorious victory already has been attained.

The Cultural Revolution phase of this confrontation was settled publicly when the 1967 Hung-ch'i New Year's editorial repudiated the doctrine of natural redness. But as a tactic for deflecting criticism from new tensions in socialist society to the class enemies of an earlier conflict, natural redness remains alive, even if it must be expressed in more subtle ways.

One Cantonese local cadre still boastfully referred to his proud family background after the Cultural Revolution:

Whenever I met a difficulty, I raised my head and looked at the great leader Chairman Mao's brilliant image and recalled how my family had for the past three generations toiled as labor hands for the landlords.45

Perhaps it is unavoidable that a Marxist revolutionary movement will show some signs of what has been called a "cult of proletarian chauvinism." 46 A western visitor to a May 7th Cadre School reported that young cadres of worker and peasant background feel that they possess a natural redness which should excuse them from this post- Cultural Revolution programme for political and ideological revitaliza- tion.47 And there have been numerous articles in the press since the

45. Feng Chao-ch'eng, "How I learn the 'dividing one into two' viewpoint," Hung-ch'i, No. 4 (31 March 1970) in SCMM, No. 680 (27 April 1970), p. 94.

46. Daniel Bell, in Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 1967), pp. 82-85, discusses an American debate on family background prior to the First World War.

47. Alexander Casella, "The Nanniwan May 7th Cadre School," CQ No. 53 (1973), p. 155.

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Ninth Party Congress in 1969 decrying the continued existence of the theory of natural redness.48 Such phenomena will not easily disappear as long as the bureaucracy contains elements desiring an elite status. Max Weber observed that:

Strata in solid possession of social honor and power usually tend to fashion their status legend in such a way as to claim a special and intrinsic quality of their own, usually a quality of blood; their sense of dignity feeds on their actual and alleged being.49

The image of a China forever divided into the opposing camps of a new distant civil war provides a ready vehicle to foster such a status legend by appealing precisely to "quality of blood."

Conclusion

By looking at some of the uses to which the idea of class struggle has been put in the past decade-and-a-half, it becomes evident that the concept which Mao in 1962 urged Chinese never to forget has not been the same as that used after Liberation. An understanding of "class struggle " in contemporary China must rest on a recognition that this much-repeated phrase bears different connotations to different users.

Class struggle has been used to direct attention to a dwindling number of old bourgeoisie and landlords, perhaps not resigned to their defeat and thus capable of sowing discord in socialist China. It has been employed by Mao to sound an alarm against new class enemies arising from within the ranks of the Revolutionary Party. And persons so castigated by Mao have cleverly endeavoured to protect themselves by insisting that class struggle must be intensified not only against the already defeated enemy of the past, but against its children as well.

Frederic Wakeman quotes Gramsci's comment that "Language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of the fossils of life and civilization." 50 The vocabulary of class in the People's Republic of China reveals both of these aspects so vividly because the content of the concept of class conflict is itself an object of the struggle it is intended to analyse. In the same essay cited by Wakeman, Gramsci later observes that "no historical situation, even that due to the most

radical change, completely transforms language, at least in its external, formal aspect. But the content of language must be changed, even if it is difficult to have exact knowledge of it." 51

48. For instance, "Do well the work of uniting with and educating easily educable children," Jen-min jih-pao, 21 April 1972; Radio Canton, BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, Pt. III (4 June 1971). " The system of grades and Lin Piao's plot to restore capitalism," Li-shih yen-chiu (Historical Studies), No. 3, (1975).

49. H. H. Gerth, and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Galaxy Books, 1958), p. 274.

50. Frederic Wakeman, Jr, History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung's Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. xi.

51. Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1957), p. 113.

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Class Conflict and the Vocabulary of Social Analysis in China

The Maoist problem is how to imbue "class" with a content applicable to the new conflicts of a socialist society, while simul- taneously inspiring a young generation with the memories of former social struggle and keeping track of the old adversaries of China's workers and peasants. But it is precisely this retention of the old content of class, increasingly a "fossil of life and civilization," which obfuscates "exact knowledge" of Mao's new approach.

Although the differing significations of class are contradictory at critical points, the fact that they all reinforce a common mode of discourse makes it unlikely that talk of class struggle will soon dis- appear. For those who use "class struggle" in each of its meanings have an interest in perpetuating its vocabulary - even if it is an old terminology grafted to a new class structure of still uncertain shape. Only former landlords, rich peasants and capitalists have an obvious interest in wishing to end the use of the language of class, and they dare not suggest it for fear of offering prima facie evidence of hostility to socialism. Even capitalist roaders within the Party have found that the language of class provides an exquisitely ironic way of waving the red flag to oppose the red flag.

From one perspective, this may be seen as a devaluation of language, analogous to the sometimes antithetical meanings which may be ascribed to such western political words as freedom, liberty and demo- cracy. Or perhaps it is simply that the Maoists have set the parameters for political discourse in China, that their vocabulary has proved to be sufficiently pliant that it can serve as the bearer of diverse currents of meaning.

At another level, the different conceptions bound up in the language of class in contemporary China are intimately connected with the future course of the Chinese revolution. It may be necessary, as both Mao and his adversaries have maintained, to keep an eye on those persons the revolution forced from power when the Party transformed the economic structure of society. But it may be more perilous, as Mao suggested, not to search out the new dimensions of inequality specific to socialist society. To fail to do so might well deaden the Party's ability to continue to promote social change, as well as diminish its interest in doing so. During the Hundred Flowers Movement, a woman later labelled a rightist expressed this danger in terms which might not be objectionable today:

If we are satisfied with the existing society, there will be no further develop- ment. Had the apes been content with reality, we would not be men today. Dissatisfaction with reality should be supported. But now some gentlemen chant cheap anthems, continually making comparisons with the Kuomintang and capitalism, always looking back rather than ahead.52

Implicit in the use of the old class designations and their second

52. In Dennis J. Doolin (ed.), Communist China: The Politics of Student Opposition (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1964), p. 37.

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generation version, family background, is a static view of the revolution, one which holds that it has been completed, and that the Party's task is now to protect it. The Maoist twist to class struggle is precisely to treat the class structure of Liberation as an inadequate foundation for future social change, to regard it as an increasingly moribund hand from the revolution's past which must not be permitted to stunt its future.

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