Maoism as
 a class society:
 illusion and reality

Both supporters and opponents saw China under Mao as an egalitarian society without hierarchy but this was an illusion.

The image of Maoist China conveyed in the poster art and other propaganda of the regime was that of a regimented and spartan but egalitarian society, without hierarchical class distinctions. Curiously enough, anti-Maoist propaganda conveyed a very similar image: several authors, for instance, dehumanized the Chinese under Mao as “blue ants.” In accordance with its egalitarian image, Maoism is commonly classified as a leftwing – indeed, “extreme left” or “ultra-left” – ideology. The blatant inequalities of post-Mao China have served only to enhance the image in retrospect.

And yet the image was always an illusion, a meticulously maintained lie. The rich memoir literature that has become available since the “thaw” of 1978 begins to dispel the illusions and portray the realities of Maoist China. And one of those realities turns out to be a class structure that differs in detail but not in broad outline from that of the “old China.”

The class geography of Chongqing

In her autobiographical Daughter of the River, Hong Ying gives us a moving account of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in a working class family in the provincial city of Chongqing. She maps the local landscape into three sharply divided domains.

First, the hilly slum district on the south bank of the Yangtze River, where the author used to live – “the city’s garbage dump,” its “rotting appendix,” crowded with ramshackle wooden sheds and with hardly any sewers. The residents are mostly “coolies” – unskilled labourers; it is very rare for a youngster to pass the college entrance exams. So it was before “liberation”; so it was in her time; so, judging by the photos in the book, it remains today.

Second, on the north bank, the city proper. “The centre of the city,” she observes with bitter irony, “might as well be in another world, with red flags everywhere you look and rousing political songs filling the air [and] youngsters reading revolutionary books to prepare themselves for the life of a revolutionary cadre” – like the cadres (officials) who ridicule and humiliate her when she tries to get her father the pension to which as a disabled sailor he is entitled.

And third, though she has never set eye on them, “the summer houses of the rich and powerful, hidden amid the lush green hillsides surrounding the city.” Here, it must be admitted, a minor change has occurred: “Once occupied by Chiang Kai-shek’s closest aides and his US advisers [Chongqing was the Kuomintang capital in 1937-45], they now accommodated high-ranking Communist Party officials.”

Decoding the official “class struggle”

So China under Mao was, like China before Mao and China after Mao, a class-divided society. And, as in any other class-divided society, class struggle existed in various forms. However, the real class struggle between the real classes that made up the society was obscured by unrelenting official propaganda about an illusory “class struggle” (“Never forget class struggle!”) that was actually something else entirely.

In Maoist China the authorities assigned every citizen an official “class” label or political “hat.” A great deal depended on this hat, from political influence and social respect to work assignments and access to medical care – not to mention the chance of ending up in a labour camp or on an execution ground. Most labels referred not to current social position but to the alleged former status of the person or of his or her parents and grandparents in the old society. Thus, “poor and lower middle peasants” (“red” categories), “upper middle peasants” (an intermediate category), and “rich peasants” and “landlords” (“black” categories) were currently all collective farmers. The harshest treatment (justified as “class struggle”) and most unpleasant jobs were reserved for “landlords,” who became a hereditary caste of pariahs like the Indian untouchables.

The real function of the labels was to measure the presumed degree of loyalty to the regime. Party leaders in good standing, irrespective of family background, belonged to the “red” category of “revolutionary cadre.” Both prime minister Zhou Enlai and secret police chief Kang Sheng were sons of big landlords and Mao’s own father was a small landlord, but that did not count against them. Conversely, worker or poor peasant origin provided very limited protection to those who challenged party policy: a “class” label could be arbitrarily changed or the malcontent could be dumped in the catch-all category of “bad element.”

So we must decode the official “class struggle” as a continuing campaign to crush all actual and potential dissent. In official discourse “proletariat” (working class) was a codeword for the regime (or whichever faction controlled the regime at any given time). When workers went on strike in 1966-67, they were accused of falling under the influence of class enemies wielding the weapon of “economism.” In other words, they were tools of the capitalist class striking against themselves!