Proletarian Power

Shanghai In The Cultural Revolution

Elizabeth Perry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429977633
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This pathbreaking book offers the first in-depth study of Chinese labor activism during the momentous upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. Arguing that labor was working at cross purposes, the authors explore three distinctive and different forms of working-class protest: rebellion, conservatism, and economism. Drawing upon a wealth of heretofore inaccessible archival sources, the authors probe the divergent political, psychocultural, and socioeconomic strains within the Shanghai labor movement, convincingly illustrating the complexity of working-class politics in contemporary China. }This pathbreaking book offers the first in-depth study of Chinese labor activism during the momentous upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. The authors explore three distinctive forms of working-class protest: rebellion, conservatism, and economism. Labor, they argue, was working at cross-purposes through these three modes of militancy promoted by different types of leaders with differing agendas and motivations. Drawing upon a wealth of heretofore inaccessible archival sources, the authors probe the divergent political, psychocultural, and socioeconomic strains within the Shanghai labor movement. As they convincingly illustrate, the multiplicity of worker responses to the Cultural Revolution cautions against a one-dimensional portrait of working-class politics in contemporary China. }

1
Radical Intellectuals

Red Guards and Literati Rebels

Shanghai's most distinctive manifestation of the Cultural Revolution lay in the prolonged activism of its working class, but it was among the intelligentsia in educational and cultural circles—rather than among workers in factories—that the movement first gained momentum. Although student Red Guards served as the principal social force in igniting the campaign, they were soon overshadowed by worker rebels. Certain politicized intellectuals, however, remained highly influential throughout the duration of the movement. Links between radical literati and leftist powerholders in Beijing redounded to the advantage of both sides over the course of the Cultural Revolution. Cooperation and conflict between such intellectuals and rebel workers helped to define the contours of the CR in Shanghai.

Protest movements in Communist China have seldom exhibited sustained cooperation between workers and intellectuals. Although both groups were involved in all the major expressions of dissent that have punctuated the history of the PRC (the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1956-1957, the April Fifth Incident of 1976, the Democracy Wall movement of 1978-1979, and, most notably, the Tiananmen Uprising of 1989), their actions proceeded for the most part along quite separate paths.¹ This was in marked contrast to the Republican period, when a united front involving students, workers, and merchants gave rise to the massive general strikes of the 1920s.²

Historically, partnerships between intellectuals and workers have been unusual in China, thanks to a bureaucratic system that rewarded intellectuals for their loyalty and a Confucian ideology that encouraged scholars to think of themselves as superior to manual laborers. Cooperation between the two groups required a weakened state, incapable of commanding the fealty of its educated, and a new ethos that valorized the status of manual as well as mental labor. In the early Republican era, warlordism effectively paralyzed the state apparatus, and the New Culture movement repudiated Confucian elitism in favor of a populist commitment.

With the consolidation of state power under the PRC, the historic separation between workers and intellectuals was reinstituted. During the Cultural Revolution, however, this rift was bridged—albeit fitfully—by Red Guards and literati rebels. Mao's call to "bombard the headquarters" plunged party and state agencies into chaos, and the initiatives of his wife and other radicals in the cultural arena glorified the status of peasants, workers, and soldiers at the expense of intellectuals. In short, the basic requirements for a partnership—state weakness and a populist ethos—seemed in place. As it turned out, however, the decisive political influence wielded by a core of leaders in Beijing, most notably Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution Small Group (CRSG), meant that in fact there remained a powerful central authority. Intellectuals thus continued to show more interest in signals from Beijing than in the demands of restive factory workers. Moreover, the ostensibly "populist" artistic reforms of Chairman Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, were transparently the product of elite engineering, rather than the expression of spontaneous cultural ferment. Interaction between workers and intellectuals was a critical part of the Cultural Revolution story, but the limitations of this engagement reflect the political manipulation that underpinned the entire movement.

Background Connections

In spring 1964, more than two years before the formal launching of the CR, Jiang Qing had accompanied her husband to Shanghai on a two-month excursion to promote a new style of revolutionary opera.³ The first secretary of the Shanghai Party Committee (SPC) at the time, Ke Qingshi, was known as sympathetic to Jiang's radical brand of cultural experimentation.⁴ Ke immediately deputized his trusted subordinate in the SPC, Zhang Chunqiao, to serve as Jiang Qing's assistant during her sojourn in Shanghai. The ambitious Zhang (who directed the SPC Propaganda Department) spared no effort to ingratiate himself with Mao's wife, even listening for hours to phonograph records so as to memorize her favorite opera arias. When Zhang's own wife inquired as to why her husband was so preoccupied with his work for Jiang Qing, Zhang reportedly replied, "Without going through her there's no way I can get close to the Chairman."⁵

The collaboration between Zhang Chunqiao and Jiang Qing blossomed over the ensuing years and helped Zhang to get very close to the chairman, indeed. In February 1966, after Jiang—at the request of Defense Minister Lin Biao—convened a symposium in Shanghai on artistic activities within the military, she was dissatisfied with the transcript of the meeting, so she commissioned Zhang Chunqiao to prepare a revised version. The resulting manuscript, in which Zhang referred to Jiang Qing as a "standard-bearer of the CR," received the endorsement of Chairman Mao and became a key document of the period.⁶

When Jiang Qing began to organize criticism of the historical drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (widely, if mistakenly, seen as a thinly veiled attack on Chairman Mao's role in the disastrous Great Leap Forward),⁷ again it was Shanghai that provided the receptive personnel. Through Zhang Chunqiao's introduction, Jiang was put in touch with Yao Wenyuan, a writer in the internal-circulation publications division of the Shanghai Party Committee.⁸ Yao Wenyuan's scathing critique of Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, published in November 1965, was hailed in retrospect as the opening salvo of the Cultural Revolution. The preparation and publication of this influential essay brought Zhang and Yao to the special attention of Chairman Mao and propelled them to the vortex of the CR storm then brewing in Beijing.⁹ When a nine-person Cultural Revolution Small Group was established in Beijing on May 28, 1966, to direct the new movement, both Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan were asked to serve.¹⁰ Five days later, the Shanghai Party Committee announced its own four-person CR Small Group, headed by Zhang Chunqiao.¹¹

With the publication in People's Daily on June 1, 1966, of Nie Yuanzi's famous big-character-poster criticizing the party leadership at Beijing University, the Cultural Revolution expanded from an intraparty affair into a mass movement. At first, Shanghai's expression of this campaign was little more than a carbon copy of what was occurring in Beijing. Big-character-posters sprouted at campuses and research institutes across the city.¹² At some high schools, the criticisms escalated beyond posters to struggle sessions, at which denounced teachers and administrators were forced to don dunce caps and submit to beatings at the hands of their students.¹³ The SPC imitated the Beijing Party Committee in launching public criticisms of "bourgeois reactionary authorities"¹⁴ and in sending work teams to various educational and cultural units in an effort to control the direction of the movement.

The Red Guards

As in Beijing, however, the mass movement soon outstripped the ability of the municipal authorities to contain it. The principal vehicle of this process was the Red Guards, feisty young students who relied on Chairman Mao's personal backing to stage often brutal attacks against academic and political authorities alike. On August 1, 1966, Mao Zedong answered a letter from the Red Guards at Qinghua University's attached middle school in which he expressed his enthusiastic support for their opposition to the CR work team stationed at their campus. Shortly thereafter, Mao criticized Chief of State Liu Shaoqi in an essay entitled "Bombard the Headquarters—My Big-character-poster." The treatise, disseminated across the country via Red Guard handbills, generated a fever of "bombard ment" (paoda, or paohong) directed against party and government cadres and agencies at all levels. Then, to make his endorsement of student behavior perfectly clear, Mao greeted a million Red Guards at Tiananmen Square on August 18, sporting a Red Guard armband.

The Red Guards of Shanghai were not limited to studying their Beijing proto-types from afar. A series of expeditions by Beijing Red Guards, dubbed the "three tours of Jiangnan" (san xia Jiangnan), brought firsthand experience to the southern metropolis. On the afternoon of August 26, some 170 Red Guards from fourteen Beijing schools arrived in Shanghai. Prior to this, a few dispersed groups of Red Guards had ventured south, but this was the first major delegation. The visitors were warmly greeted at the train station by the SPC secretary and hailed in the local newspapers as emissaries from the capital. The next day more than nine hundred students from around the country, mostly Beijing, converged on Shanghai. Their numbers increased daily, until by early September several thousand outsider Red Guards had reached the city.¹⁵

This first contingent of northern Red Guards had been formed hastily and was not well organized. Many of the participants had actually joined up quite spontaneously while on the train. They shared no unified leadership or appellation; their common goal was simply to "light a fire" (dianhuo) in Shanghai. Nevertheless, the newcomers proceeded to attack the SPC authorities, charging that their handling of the Cultural Revolution had been altogether too restrained. Taking their words directly from Mao Zedong's "Report of an Investigation of the Hunan Peasant Movement," penned in the mid-1920s at the height of the agrarian revolution, the student emissaries insisted that 1960s Shanghai also needed a "red terror" to deal forcefully with class enemies. Boasting that back in Beijing beatings had become commonplace, the northerners instructed their Shanghai counterparts in techniques of torturing former landlords, school administrators, and fellow students.

A Shanghai middle school student recalled the impact of this northern intrusion:

When the Beijing Red Guards came south, wearing military uniforms complete with leather belts, they were really awesome. They said to us, "Why are you folks here so civil, without even a bit of revolutionary spirit?" At that time I didn't understand what they meant by "revolutionary spirit." A girl Red Guard from Beijing then took off her leather belt and started to demonstrate how to whip someone. This was my first look at the Beijing Red Guards.¹⁶

On September 10 a second wave of Red Guards descended from Beijing, this time with tens of thousands of participants and an official name: "Southern Touring Regiment of Capital Universities and Institutes." Organized into divisions and battalions, the delegation was directed by a "general headquarters" stationed at the Shanghai stadium. The command post dispatched large contingents of Red Guards to fan out to the various schools and factories in the city to communicate the northern model of "revolution" to the students and workers of Shanghai. The emissaries then proceeded to investigate the class backgrounds and political experiences of cadres in neighborhoods throughout the city, enjoining residents to engage in violent struggle against so-called class enemies.

The third excursion arrived in early October. Although much smaller than its predecessor, this delegation proved even more influential because most of its participants were under the direct sponsorship of Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao. In contrast to the first two delegations, its struggle targets were precise and its explicit aim was to topple the SPC. Members of this third contingent founded a liaison post, with branches dotted across the city, which established links to rebel workers at nearby factories.¹⁷

Inspired by these missionary forays from the north, Shanghai students were quick to found their own Red Guard outfits—despite the opposition of the Shanghai Party Committee. On the night of August 22, when the SPC convened a large meeting of college students and teachers to discuss the Cultural Revolution, a note was passed to Mayor Cao Diqiu requesting permission for Shanghai to establish its own Red Guard units. Sobered by what he had witnessed of Red Guard initiatives to date, the mayor responded unequivocally, "I do not advocate the establishment of Red Guards!"¹⁸ The SPC was unable to stem the tide, however, and students in Shanghai rushed to emulate their Beijing counterparts.

On September 12 the first all-city Red Guard organization in Shanghai was founded, its membership composed of high school students. Around the same time, a headquarters for Red Guards at Shanghai's universities and technical institutes was also established. However, because they advocated keeping the Red Guard movement under Communist party supervision, these early associations were later branded "conservative" by other less subservient Red Guard units; in January 1967 they were entirely disbanded.

In contrast to the so-called conservative Red Guards, which had only two organizations (for high school and college students, respectively), numerous "rebel" Red Guard units, advocating resolute opposition to the SPC, cropped up across the city. The largest and most influential of these outfits were three: "Red Revolutionaries," "Bombard Headquarters," and "Red Third Headquarters." The Red Revolutionaries was founded on October 12, 1966, as the first all-city rebel Red Guard association in Shanghai, with initial strongholds at Fudan University, Shanghai Teachers College, and East China Teachers University. Later, it spread to high schools and claimed a total membership of 50,000. Bombard Headquarters, whose name was of course taken from Chairman Mao's famous big-characterposter, was established on November 3, with main bases at Fudan University, East China Textile Institute, Jiaotong University, Shanghai Number 2 Medical College, and Shanghai Teachers College. Red Third Headquarters, founded on December 20 as a split-off from the Shanghai Red Guard Third Headquarters, was initially strongest at Fudan and Jiaotong Universities. High school students soon composed 80 percent of its membership, however, which grew to number approximately 100,000 youngsters.¹⁹

As Red Guard units formed in most of the city's schools, the level of violence escalated in tandem. According to incomplete statistics compiled by the SPC, in the single month of September 1966 Shanghai suffered 704 suicides and 354 deaths connected to the Cultural Revolution.²⁰ Early Red Guard activities in Shanghai were patterned on the Beijing model: renaming stores and streets with revolutionary appellations, raiding temples and churches, burning books, shaving victims' heads into a yin-yang pattern and then parading them through the streets with placards denouncing them as "capitalist readers," beating up and ransacking the homes of "class enemies" and packing many of them off to the countryside, and the like.²¹ With tens of thousands of former capitalists still resident in the city, Shanghai was an especially alluring site for house ransackings. Twenty years later, the research office of the Shanghai Branch of the Bank of China offered the following statistics:

In August 1966 the Red Guards took to the streets to destroy the "Four Olds" [old customs, habits, culture, and thought] through house ransackings. Some 150,000 homes were raided, netting 65 ounces of gold; 900,000 jin of gold and silver jewelry; 3,340,000 U.S. dollars; 3.3 million yuan in other foreign currencies; 2.4 million silver dollars; 370 million yuan in cash and bonds; 300,000 jin of pearls and jade; and large amounts of all sorts of commercial products.^2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 Radical Intellectuals: Red Guards and Literati Rebels
• 2 Rebels: The Workers' General Headquarters
• 3 Conservatives: The Scarlet Guards
• 4 A Cry for Justice: The Wind of Economism
• 5 Renegade Rebels: Regiments and Lian Si
• 6 Institutionalizing Rebel Gains
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Book and Authors
• Index