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Images of China's Social Structure: The Changing Perspectives of Canton Students

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Anita Chan
Anita Chan
Affiliation:
University Kansas
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Abstract

Based on documentation and in-depth interviews with 14 emigrants from China; this study traces changing perceptions of China's social structure by different urban social groups. Each group adopted a perspective that best served its own interests. In the fifties and sixties these images did not necessarily coincide with—but nonetheless were within—the bounds of the image propagated by the Chinese authorities. During and since the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, a new perception of society has been formulated particularly by people from the former middle classes: the issue centers on whether a new bureaucratic class has emerged in China. The article closes with a discussion of the authorities' recent attempts to redefine popular images of the social structure in response to a changed social reality and China's eagerness to modernize.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , April 1982 , pp. 295 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1982

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References

1 A set of two hundred interviews in Hoog Kong with fourteen respondents in 1975–1976 resulted in more than 3,000 pages of transcripts. In addition, I have had access to Stanley Rosen's and Jonathan Unger's transcripts of interviews with some foor dozen additional young people. Along with official, documentation from China, these interviews provide the underpinnings for this paper. The respondents came from all class origins, but the majority were of middle-class status. Much of my attention will therefore be directed toward the perceptions and dilemmas of middle-class students from Canton. Except: where noted, all translations of interviews and articles are. by the author.

2 Ossowski, , Class Structure in the Social Consciousness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 19–37.Google Scholar

3 Ossowski discusses how Marx actually used all three schemata: As a revolutionary, he used the dichotomic schema; as a sociologist, the gradational; and as a theorist, the functional. Ibid., 69–88.

4 Ibid., 38–57.

5 Ibid., 58–68. For a shorter and slightly different version of the three schemata of social structure, see Ossowski, , “Old Notions and New Problems: Interpretations of Social Structure in Modern Society,” in Béteille, André, ed., Social Inequality (London: Penguin Books, 1969).Google Scholar

6 Chan, Anita, Children of Mao: A Study of Politically Active Chinese Youths (London: MacmillanCrossRefGoogle Scholar, forthcoming), chap. 2.

8 Unger, Jonathan, Education under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960–1980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, chap. 1.

9 For historical parallels, see Ossowski (fn. 2), 32, 37.

10 On the West, see e.g., Greenstein, Fred I., “The Benevolent Leader: Children's Images of Political Authority,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 54 (December 1960), 934–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Greenstein, , “The Child's Conception of the Queen and Prime Minister,” British Journal of Political Science, IV (July 1974), 257–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Chan (fn. 6), chap. 2.

12 Chan, Anita, Rosen, Stanley, and Unger, Jonathan, “Students and Class Warfare: The Social Roots of the Red Guard Conflict in Guangzhou (Canton),” China Quarterly, No. 83 (September 1980), 399.Google Scholar

13 Ossowski (fn. 2), 63–68; Cox, Oliver Cromwell, Caste, Class and Race (New York Monthly Review Press, 1959), 140–46Google Scholar; Ghurye, G. S.: Caste and Class in India, 2d ed (Bombay: Popular Press, 1957), 269–72.Google Scholar

14 Schwartz, , Communism and China: Ideology in Flux (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Ibid., 16.

16 The work-teams' actions were similar to what had been done not so long ago in the Chinese countryside in the Four Cleanups campaign. In addition to “cleansing” rural corruption, the work-teams had reinvestigated and categorized the peasants' class backgrounds. The Poor and Lower-middle Peasants Association had been revived to give the good-class peasants more self-identity, power, and status.

17 A new term, “five red type,” was coined and counterposed against the “five [badclass] category elements,” which was further extended to “seven black elements.” An interviewee reported that in one city yet another term emerged: the “five yellow elements,” which included the groups of middle-class status.

18 The blood-line theory, indeed, was later attacked by a group of non-good class students as a “new racist theory.” High School Revolutionary News (February 2, 1967, p. 3), trans, in White, Gordon, The Politics of Class and Class Origin: The Case of the Cultural Revolution (Canberra: Contemporary China Centre Papers, No. 9, 1976), 71–93.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 45–46.

20 See, for example, Lin Biao's National Day speech of October 1, 1966, and an editorial in Red Flag, October 3, 1966.

21 The workers' and peasants' children had once more been placed in an anomalous position in the first few months of the Cultural Revolution. They wanted good-class status to be the foremost criterion for advancement and esteem, but they had ambivalent feelings about the efforts of the cadres' children to base social and political standing entirely upon the gradational scale. On the basis of “class,” they had been relegated to the bottom of the Red Guard organization at many of the schools. When the second camp of Red Guards emerged, many of these worker-peasant students defected to the Rebel Red Guards but retained their own good-class combat units. See Chan, Rosen, and Unger (fn. 12), 435.

22 Mao Zedong Sixiang Wansui [Long Live the Thought of Mao Zedong] (Party document, 1969), 681.

23 A translation appears in Mehnert, Klaus, Peking and the New Left: At Home and Abroad (Berkeley, Calif.: Center of Chinese Studies, China Research Monograph No. 4, 1969).Google Scholar

24 See, for instance, Kraus, Richard, “Class Conflict and the Vocabulary of Social Analysis in China,” China Quarterly, No. 69 (March 1977), 67.Google Scholar Djilas defines the New Class as “made up of those who have special privileges and economic preference be cause of the administrative monopoly they hold.” Djilas, Milovan, The New Class (New York: Praeger, 1957), 39.Google Scholar

25 In a discussion with top Party leaders in 1964 on how to rectify the widespread corruption of cadres in the rural Party, Mao had declared: “The Communist Party is a prestigious one. Don't bring up any idea of a stratum…. This will frighten and offend too many people…. It's enough just to call them [isolated] elements or cliques.” Mao Zedong Sixiang Wansui (fn. 22), 582–83.

26 The most famous published exposé of this situation was the extraordinary confession of a high-level cadre's son, Zhong Zhimin, published in People's Daily, January 29, 1974, p. 1.

27 In the countryside, because there are no “rightist” intellectuals, there are only four-category elements, not five.

28 Mao had referred to the term in an offhand manner in 1963. The term resurfaced in Lin Biao's report to the Party's Ninth National Congress in 1969. (Peking Review, No. 1 [April 30, 1969], 17). Again it was only mentioned in passing, contained in a quote from Lenin: “The new bourgeoisie [is] arising from among our Soviet government employees.” It next reappeared in an editorial in People's Daily on February 9, 1975, and again on February 21, 1975.

29 Wenyuan, Yao, “On the Social Basis of the Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique,” Peking Review, No. 10 (March 7, 1975), 5–10Google Scholar; and Chunqiao, Zhang, “On Exercising Allround Dictatorship over the Bourgeoisie,” Peking Review, No. 14 (April 4, 1975), 5–11.Google Scholar

30 Yao Wenyuan (fn. 29), 6.

31 These latter points were also the theme of the well-known Li Yizhe wallposter of 1974. See Chinese Law and Government, X, No. 3 (Fall 1977).

32 “Combatting Prerogatives,” Beijing Review, No. 25 (June 22, 1979), 6–8; “Some Questions Concerning Socialist Democracy,” Beijing Review, No. 24 (June 15, 1979), 9–13.

33 “Mobilizing All Positive Factors,” Beijing Review, No. 7 (February 16, 1979), 5. See also “On Policy Towards the National Bourgeoisie,” ibid., and “Victory for the Policy of Remolding the Exploiters,” ibid., 8–10.

34 China Quarterly, No. 74 (June 1978), 460.

35 Guangming Ribao, November 7, 1979, p. 3.

36 Guangming Ribao, January 7, 1980, p. 2.

37 See Deng Xiaoping's speech of December 25, 1980, “Carrying Through the Principles of Adjustment, Improving the Working of the Party, and Guaranteeing Stability and Solidarity,” translated in Inside China Mainland (July 1981), 7.

38 During the crackdown of May 1981, the journal of the Party Central Committee, Red Flag, took cognizance of the dissidents' dichotomic schema and denounced it as politically subversive:

They even say that … the emergence of a so-called “bureaucratic class” within the Chinese Communist Party … is a necessary product of the socialist economic and political system; that the contradiction between it and the broad masses of the people has formed the major contradiction in present-day Chinese society; and that only by toppling this “bureaucratic class” could China's problems be solved. This is an anti-Party and anti-socialist political program, whose purpose is to struggle with our Party for the power of leadership, in order to replace it.