Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xv, 331 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$29.99, paper. ISBN 978-1-107-56550-0
Historically, the basic premise of the dictatorship of the proletariat is that in order to overcome the unfreedoms and hierarchy of capitalism, society must pass through a new, transitional period of unfreedom and hierarchy (socialism) during which classes and the state are themselves overcome. The core paradox of the transitional period is the practical working out of how its own unfreedoms point toward freedom. Felix Wemheuer’s A Social History of Maoist China is an adroit and engaging account of the lived experience of this paradox during the 27 years of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule under Mao Zedong. Wemheuer’s goal is to “maintain a reasonable balance” between the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) achievements in “modernization and social reform” without neglecting the human toll of campaigns like the Great Leap Forward or the “political terror” of the Socialist Education Campaign and the Cultural Revolution (14). On its own terms, the book is a welcome success. Wemheuer combines the work of a wide array of Western and Chinese historians with official collections of CCP documents, so-called garbage materials and ephemera, and a host of interviews conducted between 2001 and 2016 with “intellectuals from Beijing, peasants in Henan Province, and Cultural Revolution-era rebels in Shandong and Shanxi” (6). The result is a detailed history that operates in each chapter at micro, local, and national scales.
The book is divided into an introduction and eight substantive chapters, which follow a traditional periodization of the Mao era. Space does not allow for a summation of each chapter, but a general outline can be provided. In chapter 1, Wemheuer identifies “the transition from a semi-colonial, underdeveloped country to state socialism” as the “fundamental dynamic” of Maoist China (17). This was largely achieved in China’s cities by 1957, where state-owned and collective enterprises were successfully embedded into a planned economy, private accumulation of wealth through labour exploitation and property ownership was banned, and labour was de-commodified through the establishment of the “iron rice bowl,” jobs in state-owned industries from which the worker could not be fired and were guaranteed social benefits for life. Wemheuer argues, however, that the countryside was, at best, “semi-socialist” during the Mao era (18). There, attempts to eradicate private property during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) resulted in a famine that claimed tens of millions of lives. Afterward, the state redistributed private plots to the peasantry and allowed mixed ownership of the People’s Communes. Although private land use by peasants remained largely unquestioned even during the Cultural Revolution, being officially labeled as rural in the CCP’s household registration system also blocked access to the social benefits awarded urban workers. Urban versus rural household registration thus serves as a key state-imposed classification in Wemheuer’s analysis. Beyond this, Wemheuer identifies rank (the status of urban residents based on geography; membership in political, public, or industrial work units; and, for workers, participation in state-owned or collective enterprises in heavy or light industry), class status (a combination of political labels, occupation, and family background), gender (the CCP’s cis-gendered binary distinction between men and women), and ethnicity as the key categories for an intersectional understanding of Chinese society under Mao.
Successive chapters provide an overview of the period and campaigns under discussion as well as the historiographic debates that surround them. Wemheuer deepens our knowledge of these campaigns by considering them from the perspective of each category identified above. While the chapter on New Democracy (1949–1952) explains Mao’s basic concept and provides fascinating statistics on land reform, it also pays careful attention to how class labels were determined and assigned by rural cadres, the genesis and impact of the 1950 Marriage Law promising gender equality and freedom to marry and divorce, and the contemporaneous experience of building the CCP’s multi-ethnic United Front in Tibet and Xinjiang. Overlapping identities come into the latter process in interesting ways when Wemheuer notes that many People’s Liberation Army recruits for development projects in Tibet were Tibetan women due to their “low status and the refusal of many Tibetan men to work for the Han” (78). Wemheuer’s account of the Great Leap famine is detailed and convincing. The organization of peasants into communes in 1958 left them with no means for self-sufficiency. Once communes were established, declining agricultural productivity, over-reporting of agricultural yields, the determination of the CCP’s central leadership to focus on feeding China’s cities, and an increase in the urban population between 1957 and 1960 of “over 30 million people” combined to create a famine whose death toll will likely never be known with certainty (136). This account is made richer by the inclusion of women’s roles in urban communes and concurrent uprisings in Tibet. Similarly, alongside the high court politicking of the late Cultural Revolution (1969–1976), Wemheuer analyzes the urban-rural divide and female sent-down youths’ experience of rural patriarchy (252–254).
The limits of this book will depend on the reader’s attitude toward the use of intersectionality, which plays an entirely descriptive role. Wemheuer provides a Venn diagram of state-assigned categories that (correctly) identifies rural, non-Han, and women with bad class labels, as those likely to face the most layers of oppression in Mao-era China (26). A powerful descriptor, this type of presentation also tends toward a static, rather than relational, understanding of these categories. Further, these categories are themselves given by the state rather than abstracted from Wemheuer’s analysis. On the one hand, the state origins of these categories give them incredible importance in the lives of the people in this book. On the other hand, the analysis is restricted to understanding Chinese society using the CCP’s own tools. This is clearest with the concept of class. Wemheuer uses the term to describe the costs and benefits attached to labels such as worker or landlord rather than as abstractions for understanding the new relations of production after 1949. Yet, the power of this book lies in its lucid description of corners of Chinese society rarely brought together in the same volume.
Readable, arresting, and broad in scope, A Social History of Maoist China will be as valuable an addition to undergraduate syllabi as to the bookshelves of PRC historians.
Nicholas R. Zeller
University of Wisconsin, Madison