Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. vi, 468 pp. (Illustrations.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-28720-4.
This humane book exposes “undercurrents” in China. The editors’ introduction identifies three main themes (2). First, it asserts a need for more “grassroots” and “subaltern” studies about everyday life among diverse populations within Chinese society, including youths, peasants, woman workers, gays, religious believers, ethnic minorities, and others. Second, it shows that “routine violence” affected many but not all Chinese people during “high socialism” “from the mid-1950s until 1980” (6). A third finding is that most social scientists’ emphasis on “campaign time” oversimplifies the varied experiences of the Chinese people. These authors are historians, interested in contingencies and complexities, not grand causations.
But not all the chapters confirm these three ideas monotonically. Campaigns were times for “making” “bad elements” (Yang Kuisong, 19), “creating rightists” (Cao Shuji, 77), and “revising political verdicts” (Daniel Leese, 102). Jeremy Brown writes about label revisions in rural Hebei, offering evidence that national movements were occasions for reinterpreting local “distant history and recent misdeeds” (57). Yet as Vivienne Shue suggests in her interpretive “epilogue” chapter, Maoist campaigns did not affect all urbanites, even in hyperpolitical Beijing (366–369).
Many chapters compile anecdotes of particular people and contexts. These complex stories are often based on interviewees who were wronged and want to be heard, or on archival documents whose writers judged cases of goodness or badness, bravery or timidity, luck or misfortune. Cao’s chapter about the “overt conspiracy” of the Hundred Flowers clarifies the mixed intentions among local cadres and critics in 1957 rural Henan. Many were determined to “keep their mouths shut,” even as officials urged them to express loyalty by finding faults in socialist consolidation. “Most people chose silence or evasion,” but “China … did indeed have ‘rightists’ who opposed the Party.” For most “who were labeled ‘rightists,’ speaking out against injustice and unfairness was second nature” (100–101). They knew they would be punished, but they were honest.
The Great Leap Forward exploited labour. It substituted women for men in arduous outdoor work growing cotton, as Jacob Eyferth shows in a chapter called “Liberation from the Loom?” Production rose, as did the independence of wives, but this liberation involved heavy costs (143). Work was more important to labourers than politics. For rural women in Shaanxi, “1966 was not a date of great significance.” None of Eyferth’s interviewees “mentioned the Cultural Revolution.” When asked, one woman said, “we simply did not take part” (151). Maoists exploited hopes that sent-down youths could use science to modernize agronomy (Sigrid Schmalzer, 152–178). Chaos and struggle meetings decimated offices that had earlier monitored rural leaders, who could then choose to ignore central orders in favour of their own local policies.
“What happened after the Leap is not simply that the state retreated … but also that state institutions followed a path of involution and corruption” (Matthew Johnson, 201). Even in Xinjiang, the Leap “had been a disaster politically as well as economically” (Wang Haiguang, 337). The Cultural Revolution then “crippled” police who had tried to monitor apocalyptic Buddhist societies (S.A. Smith, 348). Later campaigns failed to reverse Party decline. The historians in this book nowhere refer explicitly to dynastic cycles, but their findings are consistent with that Chinese trope.
Many chapters underline the importance of “class” labels in the lives of politically active Chinese. Some victims were driven insane when assigned bad labels. Depression, paranoia, and suicidal thoughts are quoted by Sha Qingqing and Jeremy Brown from a youth’s personal diary (190). Mental illness, fistfights, hunger, rock throwing, struggle meetings, bossy cadres, and anger at unfair labelling were frequent. This context of chaos was arguably intensified because of socialist consolidation policies in the 1950s and 1960s, but coercion was not all coordinated by the state.
One of the best-known chapter writers, Michael Schoenhals, boldly asserts that writers who “focus on violence and chaos” pay excessive attention to Mao, although “the Chairman himself is not the least to blame” (230). This proposition is in tension with Roderick MacFarquhar and Schoenhals’ Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006). Mao could not monitor everything, but to reduce his role to zero is as misleading as to ignore his love of fighting and controlling and labelling people, all evident throughout his six-decade political career. His methods legitimated millions of others to use the same methods in their own interests.
Power was usually local. Cadres’ political difficulties with Guizhou and Xinjiang minorities are chronicled respectively by Wang Haiguang and Zhe Wu, who present newly detailed political histories of these provinces. Steve A. Smith writes similarly about redemptive sects such as the Yiguandao. The Party must admit that cultists, like ethnic minorities in their areas, have “mass” characteristics (343). Coercion alone is ineffective for monitoring them. Xiaoxuan Wang finds that ambiguous Party policy “lacks the support of local cadres” who are mandated to control religion near Wenzhou (261).
The main arguments of the book are not entirely new. It is refreshing for this reviewer to read a book that finds truth in detailed historical narratives (not just statistical regressions). China is so complex that many findings here are in tension with the book’s main themes. That is a virtue, not a fault. Other English-language authors have, in diverse ways, shown that everyday normal chaos, grassroots political economies, and personal attempts to avoid campaigns are long-term facts of life in China. This reviewer easily compiled a list of twenty prominent political and social scientists to whom none of these historians refer, but who have made such points in major publications. History is a social science. Social scientists neglect their topic when they are not humanists. Writers of either sort who ignore these links should reconsider. These chapters provide fine-grained evidence and reinvigorate scholarship on China in the first quarter-century of the People’s Republic. Everyone who is interested in socialist China must read this book.
Lynn T. White III
Princeton University, New Jersey, USA
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