The Rebellion of Temporary Workers and the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Workers in Maoist China enjoyed a higher level of prestige than any other officially recognized class. In the language of the CCP, "worker" (gongren) was a relatively exclusive term, referring only to permanent employees of industrial work units, who were lauded by the party as "masters of the country". In the early days of the PRC, this was a highly select group: in 1951, Zhou Enlai estimated that there were three to four million industrial workers across the whole of China, accounting for less than one percent of the population.³ Most modern industry was concentrated in Shanghai and Manchuria.

Chinese labour's relationship with the state had long been fraught. In the first half of the 1920s, labour movements had begun to develop in the cities, and large strikes had broken out. Antagonism between workers and the authorities reached a peak in 1927, when the nationalist government of the Guomindang (gmd) massacred large numbers of communists and labour activists. Organized labour in China never fully recovered from this blow. Later, urban labour movements played only a minor role in the Chinese Civil War and the 1949 revolution. As the People's Liberation Army swept through China's cities, the CCP's outreach to workers was limited to calls to maintain production and defer to the party's representatives. Following the establishment of the PRC, the CCP restricted representation of workers to the party-backed All-China Federation of Trade Unions. In the first years of the new China, urban unemployment remained high.

A number of scholars have pointed out continuities between the CCP's approach to managing the urban workforce and that adopted by the gmd before 1949. The establishment of official labour unions and workers' militias under party leadership were both nationalist innovations, as was the system of work units that the gmd had set up during the Anti-Japanese War.⁴ In the years after 1949, the party emphasized increased production, work discipline and the mutual benefits for labour and capital in a mixed economy; goals that differed little from those of corporatist regimes across the globe. Evidence from case studies adds to the impression of continuity with the old regime. To take one example, archival research on the silk industry in the city of Wuxi has shown that male overseers from the pre-1949 period, some of whom were known to have viciously beaten female workers, were still in charge of shop floors several years after the communist victory.⁵ Workers who had taken the promise of "liberation" seriously were often disappointed that so little had changed, and many believed that the revolution had failed to live up to its early promise. In Shanghai, labour unrest and strikes in the early years of the PRC put the government under sustained and unwelcome pressure.

Against this background, how are we to understand the CCP's lofty assertion that, under its rule, workers were "masters of the country"? The claim makes sense only in the context of the party's Marxist-Leninist ideology. Karl Marx had argued that prior to the proletarian revolution, which would begin the transition to socialism, the bourgeoisie would seize power from the feudal classes and replace the system of feudal exploitation with one of capitalist exploitation, of which the bourgeoisie itself would be the primary beneficiary.⁶ The working class would then lead a second revolution, which would result not only in the liberation of the workers, but – through the overthrow of the capitalist system – of humanity as a whole. Thus, the proletariat was the ultimate liberating class, expected not only to seize power, but also to abolish class structures and exploitation entirely.

During the Chinese revolution of 1949, peasants had played a much more important role than the urban population. Urban workers, however, represented the future of the communist cause and were a key element of the industrialized, socialist country the CCP was seeking to build. In line with the rest of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe, the party in the 1950s saw workers as the most progressive class. Industrial labourers worked with advanced technologies in the factories of urban China, and their social relations were thought to be based less on kinship structures than on class solidarity, built through collective experiences of strikes and the class struggle on the shop floor. The growth in the number of industrial workers in state industries after 1949 therefore amounted to an expansion of the pool of future socialists. After private ownership of land and means of production were abolished, everyone was to be a worker.

In short, the CCP's descriptions of "mastery of the country" grew out of the workers' theoretical role in the construction of socialism and the expectation that as the new China modernized, the working class would inexorably expand with it. On these terms, "mastery" did not necessarily equate to governing authority. In fact, the party constitutions of 1945, 1969 and 1973 defined the CCP not as the servant of the working class but as its "vanguard".⁷ The party was the mouthpiece, not of the transient, subjective desires that workers might themselves express, but of their deeper, objective interests. Building a communist future required the party to inculcate "class consciousness" into the workers, encouraging them to act according to the laws of historical development that would lead humanity towards communism.

Hand in hand with this went the need to strengthen the proletarian character of the party, a goal that required continual struggle against the negative ideological influence of the petty bourgeoisie and peasant smallholders. Workers had to be systematically trained to become cadres and leaders to replace officials from the old regime. The CCP under Mao adopted a narrative that viewed purging "class enemies" and fighting against leftist or rightist deviation as a way for the party to purify itself. While only the most advanced and revolutionary workers could become party members, all the workers in state-owned enterprises were automatically enrolled in official labour unions. These were the "schools of communism" that would educate and raise the political consciousness of all workers, acting – in Lenin's formulation – as the link between the vanguard and the masses.⁸ This link worked in both directions. On the one hand, the best trade union talent could be recruited into the party-state apparatus. On the other, unions were expected to implement government policies, enforce labour discipline and organize welfare in work units.

Despite their lack of independent representation and political power, many workers benefited significantly from the socialist transformation. For millions, the founding of the PRC brought safe jobs and entitlement to welfare. The number of Chinese citizens enjoying official worker status rose dramatically between 1949 and 1957, as relatively lax controls on internal migration allowed the urban population to boom. Over this period, the population of China's cities and towns rose from 57.6 to 99.4 million,⁹ while the workforce in state-owned enterprises tripled from eight to 24 million. For those who managed to become part of the permanent workforce, the PRC's promise of upward social mobility was a genuine reality. For the rest of their life, they were entitled to secure employment, welfare, food rations, free health care and cheap housing. The official retirement age was 55 for women and 60 for men, and workers could be reasonably confident that at least one of their children would be able to join their work unit in adulthood.

Beyond the state sector, the workforce in collectively-owned enterprises also expanded rapidly; from 230,000 in 1952 to 6.5 million people in 1957.¹⁰ As was intimated above, the work unit system was not an invention of the CCP, but had its origins in Republican China and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, it was under the CCP's rule that almost the entire urban population became part of the system, with social life, sport and cultural activities all collectively organized by work units for their members. For those on the inside, the new regime brought tangible benefits, and these success stories of the early PRC should not be overlooked.

However, it should not be forgotten that only a small percentage of the population ever tasted the sweetness of the "iron rice bowl". During the Mao era, it remained beyond the reach of the entire rural population. To use the contemporary phrase, almost the whole of China beyond the cities was "outside the system" (tizhiwai), without access to state-backed entitlements. Peasants became members not of work units with defined welfare schemes, but of agricultural cooperatives (established nationally by 1956) and then, by 1958, of People's Communes. Their standard of living depended on the production output of their collectives, and they were not entitled to grain rations or state-mandated welfare. Mao was among a number of leaders to argue that the country was too poor for the urban welfare state to be expanded to the villages.

Only by focusing on industrial development could China escape backwardness and poverty, and welfare for all would have to wait.¹¹ By 1958, the government had established a system of household registration (hukou) that divided China into "agricultural" and "non-agricultural" populations. An important goal of this innovation was to limit and control rural-to-urban migration. Agricultural hukou holders who left their villages without permission from the authorities had no legal access to ration cards, employment, schooling or housing in the cities. In Maoist China, life in the state-subsidized urban world was a privilege, and the government reserved the right to decide who was entitled to that privilege and who was not.

Significant inequalities existed within urban society as well. At one end of the scale was the permanent workforce of the state-owned enterprises, which existed "inside the system" (tizhinei), with high job security and generous benefits. Lower down the pecking order were workers in the collective sector, who generally earned reasonable salaries, but had reduced access to housing, medical care, social security and pensions. Below them sat a group of more or less casual labourers, known either as "temporary workers" (linshigong) or "contract workers" (hetonggong).

This group, who enjoyed only minimal protection, comprised people recruited by work units for seasonal tasks or as additional labour to fulfil short-term production goals. Many were from a peasant background, and their stay in the urban world was strictly limited. In most cases they retained their original, agrarian household registration, meaning that they were expected to return to their village after the expiration of their contract. In addition to the rural labourers, urban women made up a large proportion of the temporary workforce. Particularly in industry, contract workers were often drawn from among the wives of male permanent workers. This gendered dimension of the dual system of labour needs to figure prominently in any analysis.¹²

Divisions between the permanent and non-permanent workforce were an important feature of labour conflict throughout the PRC's twentieth-century history; from the wildcat strikes and unrest of 1956, through the early Cultural Revolution and even into the 1980s.¹³ All through the pre-reform period, temporary workers' demands for access to the "iron rice bowl" met with a lack of solidarity from permanent workers, who generally defended the status quo. The early Cultural Revolution saw this particular form of intra-class conflict reach its zenith, and to understand why, we need to examine the central government's labour policy in the two years following the Great Leap Famine (1961–1963).