Guo Yuhua on Communist Civilization

Guo Yuhua, "The Shadow of “Communist Civilization”
—An Interview with Gongshiwang (Consensus Net)[1]
 
Translated by David Ownby and Joshua Fogel
​
 
Introduction by David Ownby
         
Guo Yuhua (b. 1956) is a well-known sociologist at Tsinghua University in Beijing.  Academically, she is perhaps best known for her project, carried out with fellow Tsinghua sociologist Sun Liping 孙立平 (b. 1955) and others on “communist civilization 共产主义文明,” which is the subject of this interview.  The project, launched in the mid-1990s used an oral history approach to tell the story of life in village China, beginning with collectivization and land reform.  Several villages were chosen in north and south China, and teams of scholars and students spent many months with the peasants over the years, building relationships and collecting data.  Guo worked in Ji village in northern Shaanxi 陕北骥村, and the results of her work were eventually published in her 2013 volume, The Narrative of Those Who Suffer:  The History of Ji Village and the Logic of a Civilization 受苦人的歷史：驥村歷史與一種文明的邏輯 (published by the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong).  As the title suggests, Guo’s work reflects her embrace of “the people” and her engagement with Western theorists such as James Scott.  In the China field, her work resembles that of Friedman, Pickowicz, Selden and Johnson on village China[2] in its fiery condemnation of much of the impact of “communist civilization” on China’s rural population.
 
Guo’s embrace of the people have made her a trenchant critic of China’s authorities, as reflected in this 2018 New York Review of Books interview with journalist Ian Johnson.   This critical stance has ultimately limited the diffusion of her work and hence her influence.  Her book is banned in China (friends and colleagues “smuggle” in copies for her from Hong Kong) and her posts on social media are frequently taken down by authorities.  In this instance, the platform on which the interview was published—Gongshiwang—was dismantled by authorities in October 2016, and while the interview is still available elsewhere on the web, it is no longer conspicuously available, as it was on the well-known Gongshiwang, where it appeared together with similar interviews with other figures like the historian Xu Jilin.  Like the move from weibo to Wechat, which diminished the impact of powerful Internet voices in China by confining them to smaller “friend circles,” the “disappearing” of platforms like Gongshiwang disperses, and thus muffles, critical voices.  In other words, Guo (or Qin Hui, or Xu Jilin) can still talk, but fewer and fewer people hear their voices.
 
   
 
1.  A commitment to collecting the oral history of village life in the second half of the twentieth century
 
The origins of oral history: “History without the voice of the people is not complete”
 
Xu Shuming 徐书鸣 (journalist):  Professor Guo, you’ve been continuously engaged in fieldwork over the past fifteen years.  Could you briefly describe the background to your oral history project?

Guo Yuhua:  This project started in the mid- to late-1990s.  At the time, Professor Sun Liping 孙立平was at Beijing University, and Professor Shen Yuan 沈原 and I were at the Academy of Social Sciences.[3]  Ying Xing 应星[4] was still finishing his studies, and there was also a small group of M.A. and Ph.D. students.  Our idea was to carry out research in oral history related to the larger history of Chinese village social life in the second half of the twentieth century, so Professor Sun and I took charge of the project.  At the outset, the idea was to choose six villages in different regions throughout the country, and then to separately collect interview materials from the villagers.  We have been working for years to carry out the plan, but in fact we only worked on four villages:  Xi village in Hebei 河北西村, Ji village in northern Shaanxi 陕北骥村, Yangping village in Sichuan 四川柳平村(now a part of Chongqing municipality), and Shiwan village in Dongbei 东北石湾村.

Yuan Xunhui 袁训会 (journalist):  Why choose these villages?  Was it a random sample?

Guo Yuhua:  At the time our hope was to choose samples from different regions, from both south and north.  The last two villages we chose were from the south, but our resources were inadequate, in that the southern villages—in Guangdong or in Jiangxi—posed lots of problems, including that of dialects.  In addition, after the participating students graduated, many wound up no longer working in the same area, which left us short-handed, and we finally just dropped the last two villages.  In addition, even if we used the oral history approach in the four villages we worked on, more progress was made in some villages than in others. 

Fieldwork in Ji village was the most thorough, and basically covered its entire history over the course of the second half of the twentieth century.  Work in the other villages was oriented toward particular questions.  In some, work on “land reform” was most comprehensive, in others it was “collectivization.”  We had two goals for this oral history work at the outset:

First, China is presently undergoing a social transformation, and if we want to understand today’s transformation, we first have to understand the condition of China’s society prior to the transformation.  Many people think today’s transition has arrived at a bottleneck, that the reforms are dead and the transition stalled.  This means that research into the situation prior to the transition—from 1949 until the beginning of reform and opening—is all the more important, including the basic nature of the social system, as well as its actual mode of operation prior to the current period.  So, in order to study any aspect of the contemporary situation in China, you have to pay attention to the transition, and to analyze the process of transition, you need a sense of the historical context.  In the past, sociology paid relatively little attention to history, and when we decided to make up for this lack and look back at history, we discovered another problem, which is that the history that we had was only the official history, the historical narrative of mainstream ideology, which contained any number of twisted, hidden, or even fabricated elements, which meant that we had to treat history from a different angle.  History needs different voices; a history with a single voice is clearly problematic and suspect.  In past histories, whether official or academic, the historical experience of everyday peasants and women has been ignored.  So, our ambition at the time was to seek to understand the experiences of those people, as well as their own understanding of this historical period.  Whether you see this as a revisiting of this history, or as a retracing, our goal was to collect and record this period of history, because history without the voice of the people is incomplete history, nor is it the real history, because history does not exist in one single mode. 

Second, as scholars, we need to have a basic understanding and judgement of Chinese society to frame our theoretical or academic explorations, so we proposed the idea of “communist civilization (共产主义文明).”  Defining this idea requires understanding its logic in the organization and control of social life, which means grasping its mechanisms and logic through detailed historical materials and the stories of those who have experienced this civilization on the ground.  What is especially urgent is to make clear the mechanisms and structures of this civilization through research focused on the process of its development.  This has been our scholarly and theoretical pursuit. 

At the time we also knew that progress in the project would be extremely difficult, because the mere task of collecting historical materials is already no easy task.  Nor was our theoretical conclusion particularly well-grounded, which meant that even if we managed to collect and record the materials we were looking for, it was by no means clear that we would be able to achieve our theoretical ambition, which meant that all we could do was make slow progress as we listened, recorded, and carried out our analysis.

This is the general background to our oral history research.
 
From “leaders” to “kin:” Building trust with villagers
 
Xu Shuming:  The hardest part of fieldwork is getting into the actual lives of the villagers.  Did you run into this kind of problem in your fieldwork?  How did you solve the problem?

Guo Yuhua: On this front it helped that we were inter-disciplinary.  Ethnography as practiced by anthropologists demands that scholars enter into the social life of those they are studying, which allows them to view and think about questions from the perspective of the locals.
 
Of course, doing this demands a long period of input and interaction.  It takes more than just a couple of contacts for the peasants to warm up to you, trust you and talk to you frankly.

Xu Shuming: Can you give an example?

Guo Yuhua:  For example, the first time we went to Ji village, the locals were still fetching water in buckets from the well.  Their caves were half way up the mountain, which meant that they had to go down to the valley, fill their buckets, and then walk back up.  There were a good many people in our research team, which meant that our landlord’s water needs increased substantially, which meant more trips to the well.  This made things harder on the landlord, which we felt bad about, so we started fetching water ourselves.  I could only carry the buckets on flat land, because there was no way to put them down once you started up the slope, and it was just too much for me.  But since our team only had one man, I wound up carrying the buckets to the bottom of the hill, after which he carried them up to the caves, but it really wore us out. 
 
In our second year of research, some people in the village had started to dig their own wells, after which they bought a pump and pumped the water up the hill, which meant that there was running water.  We talked this over in our research team, and decided that we would provide the money and our landlord the labor, so that he could have a well dug in the valley below his mountain where he planted potatoes.  We hired a yinyang [geomancy] master 阴阳先生, because we didn’t know where to dig, and followed his advice.  We researchers all thought this was funny [i.e., hiring the “superstitious” yinyang master], but we were really lucky and found water on the first try.  The quality of the water was also very good.  So, we installed a pump and water pipes, which we buried underground so that they would not freeze in the winter.  This was a huge undertaking.  We first had to build a reservoir for the water above their cave and pump the water into the reservoir.  Then we had to bury the pipes on the mountain so that the water would arrive in the landlord’s home.

In fact, you don’t have to do anything in particular to get along with the peasants.  What’s more important is to be friendly, earnest and trustworthy in the course of interacting with them.  As time went on we got closer and closer to the villagers, and if a young person in the village wanted to go to Beijing to look for work, we would help them. We eventually wound up being something like relatives or kin.  When we first got there, they viewed us as outsiders, and from Beijing to boot, so they thought that we were part of the government.  And no matter how hard we tried to explain to them that we were just teachers and students, and not “leaders,” it was no use.

In the gradual process of trust-building, they would seek us out to help with some activities related to popular beliefs, for example when they worshipped the Dragon King 龙王or Guanyin 观音.[5]  At the outset, they were a little hesitant, thinking that outsiders surely would not support these “backward superstitions.”  Once, when they were rebuilding a temple, they needed someone to write an inscription on a memorial tablet that they were having redone for one of the gods, and they couldn’t find anyone in the village who was up to the task.  At the time, I was in the village with Professor Luo Hongguang 罗红光 (b. 1957) of the Academy of Social Sciences, and the former Party Secretary of the village—who became the head of the temple committee after leaving that position and was thus in charge of the “religious affairs”—came to us and asked us, timidly, “You are both Ph.Ds.  Can you help us write the characters?”  We both automatically said “Sure,” after which we both realized us that neither of us knew anything about calligraphy.  I said, “we’d better start practicing,” and borrowed brush and ink from our landlord’s fourth-grade daughter.  We started practicing on paper, but it was pretty awful.  Calligraphy takes time, after all.  We finally came up with an idea:  I transferred a nice example of traditional calligraphy from my laptop, and it fit the bill perfectly.  We finally traced the characters onto a piece of wood, and then I stayed up all night one night transferring the characters from the wood onto the tablets.  I didn’t let anyone see me, and did it in secret in my room.  When the sun came up, we put the tablets on the window sill, and when the former Party Secretary saw them he was very happy, and said: “What beautiful characters!  You really are Ph.D.s!”  We didn’t dare tell him that we had traced them. 

As things continued this way over time, they came to know that we were sincere, and that we wanted to interact with them and be their friends, and obstacles to exchange melted away and interviews became very easy.
 
2.  Can Communism be called a form a civilization?
 
“Civilization” as understood from the perspective of everyday life
 
Xu Shuming: You just explained the origin of your oral history research in the hope of arriving at a new understanding of contemporary Chinese history.  What is innovative about the analytical concept of “communist civilization” compared with the relatively mainstream history of nation building?

Guo Yuhua:  The concept wasn’t completely new.  When we were starting out with the oral history project, we discussed this idea on numerous occasions, and both Sun Liping and I wrote essays about it, arguing that we needed a concept that would cover the period of history that we were planning to study.  Some people defined it as the “culture of the Communist party,” or “party culture.”  But my feeling was that this was inadequate, and defined the scope too narrowly.  Of course, we can debate endlessly about the idea of “communist civilization,” some people saying that there’s no civilization there, only savagery.  Here, I can offer two clarifications.

The first has to do with the notion of “civilization.”  In the past, understandings of civilization have been positive, and the emphasis has been on distinguishing civilization from barbarism, in the belief that civilization brought enlightenment and awakening.  But now we can see it as a neutral concept, the form manifested by culture at a certain point in its process of development.  This is not a definition that we came up with.  Norbert Elias used the idea of “civilization” in this way in his The Civilizing Process.  He noted that when the English and the French looked down on one another, each saying the other’s behavior was uncivilized, then “civilization” contained within it the idea of “civil,” and served to affirm and brag on their own culture.  But we decided not to start with a positive interpretation.

The second has to do with the concrete contents of civilization.  In the past when we talked about civilization we always thought about huge material achievements (the Great Wall, the Egyptian pyramids), or the spiritual expressions of a civilization (thought, theory, artistic masterpieces).  In addition to these, institutional civilization is another extremely important dimension, concerned with the institutional structure on which society rests, as well as the mode of operation attached to this structure.  This obviously is another meaning of civilization.  It is easy to overlook the ordinary people who live under the structure of a civilization, their daily lives, the way they behave, think and talk, but all of these are related to civilization.

So, our understanding of communist civilization is based on our observation of the daily lives of ordinary people, an understanding of civilization from the perspective of the grassroots.  If we embrace only the positive, imposing understanding of civilization, we wind up ignoring the state of existence of most members of a society.  Communist civilization is extremely different from Western capitalist civilization, because its cultural basis, institutional organization, and even its national character are all different.  For this reason, using the idea of “communist civilization” to guide our analysis of the historical period that we want to study is both defendable and applicable to our research.  Since we can construct a history out of the daily activities of the common people, we should also be able to make clear the logic of a civilization through the words and deeds of the common people.
 
"Communist civilization” is more inclusive
 
Xu Shuming:  The definition of and reasoning behind the concept of “communist civilization” are very close to Western sociological theories.  How did you deal with the tension between Western social theory and the experience of Chinese history?

Guo Yuhua: Our hope was to go beyond Western social theory, which is based on research on capitalist civilization.  Marx, Weber, and Durkheim all looked at capitalist civilization, and were concerned with its functionality, its weaknesses, its future prospects.  We cannot simplistically apply Western theory, because after all we’re dealing with a civilization different from that of capitalism, and the theoretical goal of our work is to answer the most genuine and urgent questions about Chinese society.  But we are not rejecting Western theory, which has its own legitimacy and proper place.

Since Western scholars can produce theories on the basis of work on their contemporary societies, why can’t Chinese scholars working on China—a very particular country—produce their own theories in the same way?  We are not the only ones to feel this way.  Western scholars also think that China in transition is a goldmine for academic research, that the “social facts” produced in the process are stunning.  Western societies are already well-structured and stable, and have been well-studied.  This is not the case for China, where daily changes leave scholars breathless.  From this perspective we can do a lot of theoretical work, and engage in dialogue and exchange with Western scholars, together adding to the store of human knowledge.

Xu Shuming:  By starting with the idea of “Communist civilization” and only after building your theoretical framework through empirical research, do you not run the risk of limiting your academic research vision?

Guo Yuhua: No. “Communist civilization” is not a particularly rigorous, complete concept, nor have we attached a great deal of theory to it.  When I discussed it with Sun Liping and Shen Yuan, we decided that what we called it was not very important—and we could even have called it “fish”—what was important was that it is an open system [i.e., the beginning of an exploration].  In my book [see translators’ introduction], the “logic” that we attributed to communist civilization all came from generalizations based on empirical research and fieldwork.  The idea is based on two preconditions: first, it was different from Western capitalist civilization; and second, in its process of operation it produced a complete set of mechanisms, logics, and techniques of power.  We cannot simplistically reduce this to party culture.  Instead, it is more inclusive and more important because it is implemented in the social practice of ordinary people.
 
From “not identifying” to “believing”:  The fascination of researching Communist civilization
 
Yuan Xunhui:  As a new form of civilization, when communist civilization encountered Chinese tradition, did the two engage in exchange?

Guo Yuhua:  Of course. In fact, we really can’t say that communist civilization is a new form of civilization, because it’s hard to tell if it’s old or new, and most of it consists of old and new ideas mixed together.  It’s an ensemble of intellectual concepts and practical logics that gradually came together as the CCP built its regime and consolidated its political power. 

The fascinating part of this system is what we might call its “macro-level social ideal,” its “beautiful communist blueprint,” which at first glance has nothing to do with the peasants.  In fact, it’s not just the peasants, probably most intellectuals didn’t identify with this “blueprint” either.  Outside of the small number of people who founded the CCP, what does this have to do with most people?  From this perspective, it looks like these ideas would have had no chance of succeeding, but in fact, in practice, they influenced many, many people who fought for it, sacrificed for it, and believed in it.  In this sense it’s worth trying to understand how these ideas mobilized so many people, how they came to dominate the mental world of so many people, changed the lives, social relationships and even their spiritual worlds.  This is what we want to understand and analyze.

The emphasis in our research on Ji village was squarely on these beliefs or this ideology, and how all of this came to be integrated into the lives of the villagers.  This is especially interesting given the conflicts between these concepts and the existing mentality of the villagers, who nonetheless finally came to “accept” the new ideas.  Of course, what the villagers accepted was clearly different from what the CCP thought at the outset, but we cannot say that the villagers were not influenced at all, because they were changed by the ideas in ways related to their way of life and their way of thinking—the entire structure of village society was changed.  For example, in traditional peasant thinking there is the concept of unity大同, as illustrated by the slogan of “equalizing rich and poor 均贫富” used in peasant uprisings over the years.  There is a certain overlap between this traditional idea and Communist ideals, and of course there are many ways to combine the two.  These are what we might call techniques of power.  Peasants always need a belief, and the use of power allowed Communist ideals to penetrate deeply into village society.

Yuan Xunhui: You just mentioned numerous activities related to popular beliefs in Ji village.  When Communist activities were the most popular, were they still there?

Guo Yuhua: You could say they were forced out of existence.  Because beliefs, images, and ceremonies were all replaced by the mechanism of Communist civilization.  For example, the peasants’ originally believed in the Dragon King or Guanyin, but the Communists said that these were all “feudal superstitions” that had to be eliminated.  Land reform destroyed some, and at the time of collectivization and the Great Leap Forward, they ceaselessly suppressed traditional village beliefs.  And, during the Cultural Revolution, idols and village temples were practically all demolished.  They needed to be replaced at the time, and belief in the revolution and its leaders filled the void.

Yuan Xunhui: My grandmother believed in Buddhism.  At the height of the Cultural Revolution, she still believed in Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, but circumstances would not allow her to worship openly, so she often awoke in the middle of the night at 3:00 a.m. and offered sacrifices in private by herself.  Once political campaigns were over, popular belief and sacrifices returned, and compared to traditional Chinese popular culture, Communist civilization was perhaps only a temporary phenomenon created by political campaigns.

Guo Yuhua: You can’t really say it was temporary, because in the end many things changed fundamentally.  For example, originally many popular ceremonies (carrying the Dragon King in his sedan chair to pray for rain, using divination sticks) were thoroughly replaced by political ceremonies at the most extreme moments.  Even though they were forced out of sight, these ceremonies did reemerge once again, but they were not the same as they once had been; they had been transformed, merged with something of a different essence.
 
3. The Logic of Communist Chinese Civilization
 
The lumpenproletariat become the initial activists in village land reform
 
Xu Shuming: In the Chinese Communist penetration of grass-roots villages, land reform was a critical moment.  There are documents that illustrate that after the Chinese Communists carried out basic land reform and redistribution, many peasants quietly returned the land to the landlords.  How do you understand such behavior?

Guo Yuhua: That happened in Ji village, the one I worked on, and not only did they return the land, but they even returned all the redistributed property.  This was not the case everywhere, and the peasants who returned land were genuinely honest, decent people, who despite being caught up in a revolutionary process, nonetheless followed traditional ideas.  In our fieldwork, we asked them: “Why did you return the land?”  They replied “if somebody had that [land] it was because they had worked for it.”  In other words, they were saying: “That’s not mine.”  In their view, the land and property had been accumulated bit by bit through the diligence and ability of the property owner.  In Ji village, some landlord families had numerous cave dwellings, and the process of constructing these caves was exceedingly slow—for example, it could take a year to build one-half or one-third of such a cave, and when they had a bit more money the next year they would continue the work.  So, the construction of a cave could take many years to complete.  After the revolution arrived, the traditional rural village order was turned upside down overnight, and honest, decent peasants had a hard time accepting it.

In addition, returning the land involved practical considerations, such as the worry that the land allocated today might very rapidly be returned tomorrow.

Yuan Xunhui: So, ultimately, people with money still held influence in local areas.

Guo Yuhua: Yes.  On the one hand, the peasants worried that the Guomindang would return, and they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on in the village.  On the other hand, many landlords were the elders in lineages to which the peasants belonged, even lineage heads who may have been linked by blood ties—how could they steal from them?  This is the reason that land reform in many villages ran into difficulties with mobilization.

Thus, in the midst of land reform, the most extreme, the most violent people were dishonest people, people the peasants called “black skins 黑皮,” “savage demons 野鬼,” or “bastards” (混种子, 杂种).  These people had nothing and belonged to the lumpenproletariat.  They were totally devoid of scruples, and it was they who became the initial activists in village land reform.
 
“Land to the tiller 耕者有其田” was only a slogan
 
Xu Shuming: Regarding the Chinese Communist land reform policy, Yang Kuisong 杨奎松[6] has noted that at the time of the promulgation of [Liu Shaoqi’s] May Fourth directive 五四指示 [1946] and the launch of land reform, the Chinese Communists had no intention of using land reform to expand the military, because at the time the major Party policy was to cooperate with the Guomindang.[7]  Yet as you point out many times in your research, in village-level documents, the goals of land reform and enlarging the military were linked, which means that high-level policy and village-level practice seem utterly divorced from one another.

Guo Yuhua: No, it wasn’t a divorce between top and bottom, but the differences in land reform in different localities were immense.  Land reform in older base areas was basically a gradual process going from moderate to violent; in newer areas it was implemented all at once, and was relatively violent from the beginning.  The main reason, though, was concern by the upper level to take stock of the situation, which produced differences in matters of timing.  This also reflected the basic logic of Communist civilization—namely, a pattern of action based on pragmatism or utilitarianism, to reach the goal by any means necessary.

In the older base areas of Northern Shaanxi during the period of Communist-Guomindang cooperation, relations between the Chinese Communists and the local gentry was extremely close for basic reasons of survival in the local areas, and the grain and housing provided by local gentry were essential to the Party.  In Ji village Mao even borrowed a set of the Twenty-Four Histories 二十四史 from a local gentry household and never returned it, just compensating the family with a little bit of millet.  Li Dingming 李鼎铭, a gentry figure from a border region at that time, took part in the Three Thirds System 三三制.[8]  He was greatly appreciated by the Communists for his implementation of the policy of “crack troops and simple administration 精兵简政,” but ultimately he reportedly committed suicide by swallowing gold.  This illustrates that the Communists’ policy was based on expediency.  During the War of Resistance, they needed a united front against Japan, and thus their land reform policy was one of moderation and rarely challenged the landlords.  When land reform began, the policy was to “reduce rents and interest 减租减息,” to test “trial requisitioning 试办征购,” and to encourage voluntary “contributions of land 献地,” all without coercion.  After the May Fourth Directive, particularly with the promulgation of the “Outline of the Land Law 土地法大纲,” the policy underwent a fundamental change, and now it was to confiscate the lands of the landlord class to distribute to landless peasants.[9]  Policy was consistently dictated by the needs of the time.

Yuan Xunhui: The Communist Party has always been very “crafty 狡猾.”  When the Communists entered my hometown in 1949, they absorbed several cultured gentry figures into the system.  My grandfather was very active at the time, and he thought he was young and could make a major impact in the new regime.  However, after the regime stabilized, it began to lose confidence in him and kept the gentry at a distance.

Guo Yuhua: This sort of thing happened repeatedly, because the policy objectives of the Chinese Communists and the goals about which they boasted endlessly were not the same.  During land reform giving “land to the tiller” was a slogan calculated to best win over popular sentiment, and everyone took this as a worthy goal.  Looking back on things now, “land to the tiller” was clearly not an objective, but rather a means of mobilizing people during the war, expanding the military, and winning over the people.  By obtaining the support of the masses and investing manpower and physical resources, they would gain the support of the masses for the new regime after the establishment of the Communist government.  After the regime stabilized and collectivization commenced, the land allocated to the peasants was all taken back.  “Land to the tiller” and the idea that it was an objective was, needless to say, just a slogan or a means to an end, and nothing more.
 
The Illusion of “Women’s Liberation”
 
Xu Shuming: Women’s policy was also like this.  Women’s liberation was a highly important item in what the Chinese Communists called “liberating all of China.”  The provisions in the “Marriage Law” gave women great freedom, enabling them to demand no-fault divorces.  After collectivization, though, women were subjected to discrimination in positions within the work teams, and the work-point system was clear in its inequality to women.  What is your assessment of the Chinese Communists’ policy on “women’s liberation”?

Guo Yuhua: On the question of “women’s liberation,” I differ from many scholars who have studied this topic.  Many of them argue that during the revolutionary period women achieved genuine liberation, but once the period of reform and opening began, women’s position once again declined.  I completely disagree with this judgment.  “Women’s liberation” after 1949 was not real liberation in any genuine sense of the term; instead, women were the passive objects of liberation.  Liberation is a subjective process; one liberates oneself.  If another bestows it on you, how can you call this liberation?  Anything “given” by another person can just as easily be taken away, and since this was the case with women’s liberation at the time, it was meaningless.  During land reform the Communists encouraged women’s literacy and mobilized women to participate in political campaigns, but this “participation” was only an indicator of the revolution’s success.  Rather, you might say that women were mobilized.
What had the greatest impact on women’s lives and production was cooperativization 合作化.  For example, in Ji village before cooperatives were formed women did not work in the fields, because traditional roles in the division of labor dictated this.  Only during a few days each year, such as during planting season, when there was insufficient manpower, would women help plant seedlings.  In the division of labor, women had their own responsibilities, such as cooking, cleaning, caring for the elderly, raising children, weaving cloth for shoes and the like—indeed, the number of tasks was considerable.  Cooperativization used a set of institutional arrangements to compel women to participate in collective labor movements, claiming this to be the liberation of women’s labor.  However, when they went with men to till the soil, they still had to assume their traditional family chores.  So, was this liberation or had the circumstances actually worsened?  As I describe it in my book, women during collectivization endured starvation, sickness, and anxiety about their children, amid various sorts of pain and suffering, and had nowhere to go for help.

To a certain degree the so-called “women’s liberation” was nothing but an illusion.  The Guanzhong Plain 关中平原in Shaanxi Province during collectivization was a very large site for cotton production, and cotton was an essential agricultural product for the country’s industrialization.  However, planting requires the investment of a huge amount of labor.  At that time, women’s labor capacity was mobilized, and women were treated as instruments of labor—is this what liberation means?  At the same time that the burden on them was made heavier, the work points policy was highly unfair.  Women’s work points were always inferior to men’s, no matter how competent they were.  During cooperativization, the population of Ji village was divided into different teams, such as agricultural teams, and all team members were expert at sowing.  The majority of women’s labor power went into work on capital construction teams; they were responsible for repairing terraced fields and providing supplemental labor on the plain.  They completely ignored the fact that women are physically relatively weak, and moreover have to bear children, yet they were viewed as and used as tools.  And the compensation they received was also very low.

The crux of the issue was that women had no freedom to choose.  They could not give up working for work points, because without work points they could not get food.  Isn’t this forced labor?  Have they not effectively transformed women into slaves of the nation?  In a country where everyone is a slave and no one’s human rights are guaranteed, how can you have women’s liberation?  Does participation in labor or collective labor mean liberation?  I don’t believe so.

Xu Shuming: This also reflects what many people thought at the time, which is that “women’s liberation” meant that men and women should be completely equal, and that there should be no differences at all.

Guo Yuhua: Right.  How can men and women be the same?  Can men take the place of women in child-birth and child-raising?  Some of the women in Ji village told me about their experiences bringing up their children.  Because they worked in the fields, mothers were often unable to breastfeed their children, who screamed and cried from hunger.  The mothers, too, suffered, with tears streaming down their faces.  These memories were firmly etched in their memory.
 
“Belief” or “fear”: How did the Chinese Communists penetrate the villages with their ideology?
 
Xu Shuming: There is a consensus in the academic world that the Chinese Communists’ capacity to penetrate to the base of society is extremely strong, but do the peasants really believe the ideology of Chinese Communist system?  Or, is it fear that leads them to feel that they have no choice but to acquiesce to the regime?

Guo Yuhua: Both are present.  First of all, putting this system into effect necessitates an economic base, which is a planned economy.  The system of a planned economy is actually a form of control.  The lifeline of the peasants’ economy is firmly under control, and their necks are firmly in the clutches of the regime.  What choice do their have?  They even lack the freedom to withdraw.  Just as Professor Qin Hui 秦晖has said, the people’s communes are not collective farms—they’re concentration camps, and the major feature of a concentration camp is that you can’t leave.[10]  The fellow villagers in Ji village have an expression called qianggu 强箍 (to muzzle or straitjacket).[11] It describes the system very well.  Agricultural collectivization is a qianggu process of cooperativization.

A few days ago, I read a novel entitled Rose Valley 玫瑰坝which talks about the great famine period [during the Great Leap Forward].  In one village many people starved to death.  There was only one family which not only did not go hungry, but had extra food to help others.  Because this family suffered from leprosy, it could not work with everyone else and divide work points.  The villagers forced them to a valley, built them a house, and allowed them to work the land and grow food on their own.  Because they had no contact with the outside world, at the time of the famine, they had food and drink, and their lives proceeded apace.  Although just a novel, it reflects very well the disasters this system inflicted on the peasants.

In addition to coercion, there is also ideology.  Coercion and indoctrination work hand in hand, one supporting the other.  On the one hand, they are constantly told that Communism is good, while at the same time they have no other options.  The peasants have no choice but to accept.  This is closely related to the national character of the Chinese people.  To suffer a bit less, they opt for compliance, or sometimes display a greater activism if they think they might benefit from it.  With the passage of time, these patterns of behavior become natural.

Xu Shuming: Can we understand things in this way?  People who entered this system early on are most likely to comply out of fear, but after living under the system for a long time, perhaps long enough for the next generation to be born, they evolve a heartfelt belief in the system over time.  As the American political theorist Robert Dahl (1915-2014) has stated, the longer a regime remains in existence, the more legitimate it seems.

Guo Yuhua: There are certainly many people like the ones you have just described, but it does not describe everyone.  During the Socialist Education Movement,[12] for example, many cadres who had been thoroughly loyal and devoted to the CCP were denounced during the campaign as “greedy and selfish,” and as “corrupt.” The work teams made them suffer terribly, and they indeed may have harbored a grudge.  There was a Party secretary in Ji village who was pressured to the point that he nearly hanged himself.  This led him to reflect on society from a different perspective.  Although he found it quite difficult to understand that the system could inflict such pain on him, he could only feel that it was unjust--this was the extent of his reflection.  Nowadays, if you ask peasants think back on that phase of history, they can see that Chairman Mao was not without error.  Thus, we can’t completely lose faith in the will of the people, because even the greatest power cannot remain in perpetual opposition to the most legitimate and basic demands of the masses. 

Xu Shuming: If an individual is attacked in the context of a political incident, leading him to rethink the nature of the system, can this be seen as the impetus for the dissolution of a system of planned economy?

Guo Yuhua: It is surely one of them.  The most basic impetus is still the fact that the system itself was unsustainable.  The peasants themselves had no enthusiasm.  Whether they invested 120% or 20% of their labor, in the end their profits were only 20%.  Everyone naturally wound up slacking off.
We carried out many interviews with the accountant in Ji village during collectivization.  He said that many people stole items belonging to the collective.  This phenomenon is worthy of analysis, because everyone knows that theft is immoral.  However, under these particular circumstances, the peasants understood theft as taking back things that originally belonged to them.  Why should they hand over the fruits of their labor to the system or have such transferred to other areas?  Since the state did not allow them to take such items, they stole them, but they didn’t see what they were doing as theft, and hence had no sense of moral guilt.

The system of people’s communes had reached a dead end, there was universal consensus on this point.
 
4. The Shadow of “Communist Civilization”
 
Do the peasants cherish the memory of the Mao era?
 
Xu Shuming: Nowadays, many peasants feel conflicted when they think back on the history of the collectivization period.  On the one hand, the atmosphere in the rural villages during collectivization was good, everyone had a sense of public spirit, and they would certainly attack grassroots corruption.  At the same time, the memories of famine at the time remain especially profound, and older people are teaching their children and grandchildren to treasure their present lives in which they lack for no basic necessities.  How do we explain this ambivalence?

Guo Yuhua: Actually, there’s no contradiction here.  When those with personal experience criticize the inequities in contemporary society, they use the discourse of the socialist period, such as “Party cadres must be honest”; or “All these corrupt officials we see today would have been executed under Chairman Mao,” as if they cherish memory of the Mao period.  This sort of reminiscence or memory is often cited by the New Left to prove that the peasants were happier in the old days.  In fact, this is hugely misleading.  When I was doing research in Ji village, we asked peasants: “Would you like to return to the Mao era?”  The peasants immediately replied: “We’d be fucking dead if we returned to that era!”  We can clearly see here that the peasants do not genuinely long for those days.  Trying to understand why, it appears that although they know that their own suffering is traceable to some sort of unjust arrangement, it is very hard for them to attribute this to the institutional framework of Communist civilization.  Peasants have a hard time carrying out a scholarly analysis of institutional arrangements, that’s what scholars are for.  But when you ask the peasants directly, it’s all crystal clear.

The peasants’ own narrative concerning the abolition of the communes can also bear out my views.  The peasants of Ji village told us that, as they saw it, there was still the same amount of land, the people were still the same people, and after the land was divided, they would have plenty to eat.  They said: “I’ll work for myself.  I’ll work as much as I want to.  I’ll make the decisions.” “Once we’re free, we’ll be happy and complete.”  We did not put the word “freedom” in their mouths.  When the peasants talk about that period, they are unable to restrain their emotions and naturally use that word.  This is liberation in the true sense of the term.

Xu Shuming: The linguistic resources of those who lived through the era of collectivization are surely quite limited.  When confronting the many different injustices of contemporary society, they can only use language from the Mao era with which they were familiar.

Guo Yuhua: That’s right.  Having gone through many years of training, not only the peasants, but even we scholars often use language from the Mao period.  For example, we speak of pre-liberation, post-liberation, or the wrongly labelled rightists, among others, but what is “liberation?”  Surely all the “rightists” were unfairly labeled?    You can see that even our language has become “alienated 异化,” the peasants’ use of bureaucratic terminology is utterly normal.  When speaking about events in their own lives, however, they did not adopt this language… 

Yuan Xunhui: Were Party cadres more deeply influenced by this kind of ideological language?

Guo Yuhua: There were differences among the cadres.  Ultimately, many cadres were uncultured sorts, some of them were even illiterate.  They had a hard time accepting Communist discourse.  Therefore, if the institutional constraints were ever taken off, they naturally reverted to their own language patterns.
For example, I just mentioned the old accountant.  He was always using yin and yang and the five elements, as well as astrological and astronomical phenomena, to explain Chinese history, saying things like: “The emperors, the generals and the ministers were all celestial constellations; Chairman Mao was not a true constellation; he was a Turtle star 鳖星, Chiang Kai-shek a Fish star 鱼星.  Thus, Chiang Kai-shek went off to an island, and Chairman Mao defended the Mainland.”  The peasants have many ways of their own to express themselves—only, it’s often difficult for others to understand, even if they are serious.  At the beginning, they did not want to talk with us, and were always asking: “What do you really want?  Why are you always asking us about these things?”  I replied: “I would like to know your history and to know how these past years have been for you.”  They asked: “What do you mean?”  I explained why ordinary people’s history is important, too: “Your history isn’t just important to your children, grandchildren, and posterity, but it’s important to all of society.”  They slowly came around, and once they understood they were especially keen on “chatting 拉话” with us.
 
This old accountant believed that he had special speaking rights in the village.  Thus, he always enjoyed seeking us out to have a chat.  On one such occasion, he said to me: “The ones I most believe in are intellectuals.”  I asked why, and he replied: “All history is what intellectuals write down.”  You see!  He understood what history was and understood that it had weight.  He said: “Intellectuals are great.”  His meaning was that intellectuals were capable of recording and evaluating history, and his underlying meaning was that, although rulers are powerful, they are judged by history.  This old fellow’s understanding of history is not inferior to that of historians.

In fact, the peasants face immense pressure to simply survive, and if they are to go on living in this environment, they need not only the capacity to survive, but above all the wisdom to survive.  Peasant wisdom is such to make us ashamed of our own ignorance.  People with such wisdom are certainly capable of judging history.
 
What is the solution to the dilemma of governance at the grassroots level?
 
Xu Shuming: Villages presently lack a mechanism for cultural integration.  Traditional culture was wiped out in the era of collectivization and notions of class no longer fit in contemporary society.  All of this creates numerous dilemmas in grassroots governance.  What solutions do you see? 

Guo Yuhua: This is an overarching problem, true for all of Chinese society as well as the villages. Although ideological propaganda has not diminished at all, it is already completely bankrupt, and even those spreading it don’t believe a word of it.  There are also people who are searching for answers from within China’s cultural tradition, but I feel this is unrealistic.  The essential ideas of traditional culture are basically only compatible with the imperial system, which is thousands of years old.  I think that finding resources there for contemporary politics is going to be extremely difficult.

Of course, traditional village resources should not be abandoned by the people, as they serve the needs of contemporary society, but this process certainly must come from the local masses themselves.  This is especially true of traditional social organization and its norms, because their emphasis on morality, order, and the rule of personal interrelationships may all be put to use in village administration together with contemporary democratic principles.  I believe we can place our hope in the reinvention of the autonomy of popular society as we seek solutions to problems of the contemporary governance of the villages.
 
One strength is that of local society, and another is the tradition of commerce, which is also very significant.  For example, in places like Wenzhou and Guangdong.  The history of commercial civilization is well-developed, and people in such areas have personal experiences with commerce, such as a sense of business contracts.  Commercial civilization and local social traditions, growing out of traditional culture, hold promise for producing contemporary political civilization.
 
But these two are not enough.  They ultimately were not shaped by contemporary society.  For example, local society traditionally had numerous lineage rules which are not terribly useful in contemporary society.  Thus, the crux of the issue is how we integrate cultural resources with contemporary social practice, so as to shape and promote the healthy development of Chinese society.

Yuan Xunhui: The population mobility rural China today is intense, and many traditional villages are being abandoned.

Guo Yuhua: This is true.  Some villages are showing signs of cultural decay, so much so that villages overall are trending in that direction.  The state, the market, and peasants themselves are all abandoning them, unless land in a given area is chosen as an area for development.  Yet, land so designated may prove disastrous for the peasants. 

Xu Shuming: Do you believe that urbanization is the answer for the development of rural villages?

Guo Yuhua: Ordinarily urbanization would provide a solution, but the problems with urbanization in China today are immense.  All this kind of urbanization does is to make the cities ever larger, like pancakes on the griddle.  Expanding Beijing municipality from two ring roads to six is “urbanization” for the cities and not “urbanization” for peasants.  The peasants’ land and rural resources have all been absorbed by the cities, with the exception of the peasants themselves.  The peasants are treated as manpower but not as people.  They can come to the cities and contribute their labor power, but only if they return to their hometowns can they receive various social protections.  Professor Lu Xueyi 陆学艺 (1933-2013)[13] once noted: “Nice trees will be transported from the village to the city, so the trees are urbanized, but not the peasants.”  Where does urbanization not require peasants?  Can you carry out urbanization without peasants?
 
The nature of contemporary Chinese society: “Post-totalitarian” or “Neo-totalitarian”?
 
Xu Shuming: In terms of party policy on the peasants, the expropriation of the collectivization period has continued right down to the contemporary era.  The only difference is that during collectivization, the land was confiscated and invested in the collective, and now the peasants are being squeezed through the selling off of the land [to commercial or industrial concerns].

Guo Yuhua: Many people today say that China is a post-totalitarian society.  I completely disagree.  I have discussed this notion with Professor Sun Liping and Professor Shen Yuan, and we feel that “post” would mean that China is no longer a totalitarian society.  I would say rather that it is “neo-totalitarian,” but what does “neo” mean here?  It means that power controls society completely by integrating all essential features of the market.  In the era of the planned economy, there was no economic life outside the plan and there was no private property.  The present market economy is a market economy (controlled by) political power.  The state completely controls the pulse of the economy, which can be a very frightening thing.  The trend toward “the state advances, and the people retreat 国进民退” is not only an economic problem, but it further means a return to the era of total control.  Not only is this the old road—it’s a bad one.
 
5. The Difference between “Communist Civilization” and “Chinese Characteristics”
 
We must destroy “Sinocentrism”
   
Xu Shuming: You have tried using the term “Communist civilization” to explain the logic of China’s historical evolution.  Hu An’gang 胡鞍钢 (b. 1953)[14] and others have used “Chinese characteristics” to explain China’s developmental experience.  Where does your thinking differ from theirs?

Guo Yuhua: While the notion of a “Chinese model” or “Chinese characteristics” aims to conceptualize a Chinese model at a theoretical level, these ideas also, as I noted earlier, evince a positive attitude toward the reality of contemporary China and betray a certain yearning to achieve a final victory over capitalist civilization. The point of the notion of a “Communist civilization” is to see through the internal logic and essence of this system.  Only when we have a clear understanding of the mechanism can we make a clear judgment.  The supporters of the “Chinese model” are a little blind, but it surely cannot be that everything labelled “Chinese characteristics” is good, and that as long as we follow a “Chinese way” that is different from that of Western countries, then everything will work out?

Why do we appreciate the analytic power and the insight that comes from the idea of “Communist civilization?  Our true goal is to study it and analyze it, and not simply to embrace Chinese tradition, the Chinese model, and thus worship it as a god and argue that any difference proves our superiority.  We always say that we can’t fall into the trap of Western-centrism,” but is it then rational to uphold “Sinocentrism?”

Xu Shuming: Can what you have dubbed “Communist civilization” develop into a generalizable theory?

Guo Yuhua: We most certainly do not stress any sort of theoretical universality (note that this is not “generalizability”).  “Communist civilization” is a puzzle for us, and to a large degree our goal is to gradually deconstruct it.  The essence of sociology lies in the power of criticism; it can’t just sing the praises of and glorify power.  No matter how good a government is, sociology must still must look at whatever problems exist in society; it is by nature explanatory and critical.  There are scholars who insist that we also take a critical stance vis-à-vis Western capitalist civilization.  This is necessary, but it is not the mission of Chinese scholars, because we do not live in Western societies.  This is a responsibility that Western intellectuals must assume, and our focus is on diagnosing the ills of Chinese society. 

China’s social problems are not the result of excessive Westernization.  Everyone feels that he or she is distinctive, and uses this as a pretext for not assuming the most basic universal values.  Should we not admit this?  World trends today are not toward unity, but pluralism and coexistence.  How do we get to pluralism and coexistence?  If everyone insists that he is unique, and refuses to accept common values and norms, then how can we coexist?  If we want China to coexist in harmony with the rest of the world, the basic premise is that everyone accepts the same rules of the game.  Universal values are the cultural basis of the rules of the game.  I have penned two essays—“Universal Values are Basic Common Sense 普世价值本是常识” and “Just How Unique are the Chinese People 中国人到底有多特殊?”—which discuss this issue.[15]  As long as we are part of humanity, then we aren’t that distinctive.  We must recognize humanity’s basic values, otherwise couldn’t extreme religious organizations justify their terrorism by claiming to be distinct?
 
In addition, rules of the game are the product of mutual discussion and competition. Everyone makes compromises and concessions, and dispenses with some of their distinctive traits, thereby forming a consensus of values we can all accept.  Would this not be universal values?
 
If We’re Not Yet Modern, How Can We Talk about Deconstructing Modernity?
 
Xu Shuming: There are some believers in the “Chinese model” who claim that rightwing scholars harshly criticize contemporary China, while at the same time indiscriminately accepting a system of values based on Western theory.  They call this the behavior of “Western slaves.”  How would you respond to this?

Guo Yuhua: Chinese and Western intellectuals are facing different issues.  Many Western intellectuals are nowadays engaged in post-modernism and deconstructionism.  What they want to deconstruct are precisely the Western values that preach convergence, and they advocate values that are more plural.  However, Chinese society is different.  It has not yet constructed modernity.  How can we talk about deconstruction?  Even if Western scholars carry out the deconstruction of contemporary social values, the most basic of values—such as democracy, freedom, brotherly love, human rights, the rule of law, etc.—will still exist as a foundation, and these are things that China still lacks.

For example, in research on contemporary labor issues, some scholars blame everything on neoliberalism.  They claim that the Chinese labor situation is the worst in the world, and the root of the problem is the globalization of capital supported by neoliberal ideology.  I would like to first ask: Where is Chinese liberalism?  If China still has no liberalism, what is this neoliberalism they’re criticizing?  The crux of the problem of Chinese labor lies in social inequities in the structure of power.  To be sure, the globalization of capital has had an influence, but it is not a direct cause.  Where else in the world can bosses get away with mistreating workers like this?  Only in China!  In addition, workers in other countries have recourse to resistance or strikes after being mistreated.  Can Chinese workers do this?  If they were to strike, they would run afoul the government’s policy of “maintaining social stability 维稳.”  These are “Chinese characteristics!”

A little while ago, I gave a lecture at Minzu University of China (中国民族大学Central University for Nationalities) on the topic of “China’s Special Characteristics as the Factory of the World 世界工厂的中国特色.”  China is the world’s factory, and clearly a world factory with Chinese characteristics.  The nature of capital is to exploit and mistreat workers, but in the absence of China’s structure of power, the damage done by capital could never reach such a level.  When workers at the Foxconn Technology Group committed suicide by jumping out of a building instead of resisting, people thought this was very strange.  If they were unsatisfied, why didn’t they quit?  But if they were to quit their jobs, what future could these young people expect?  With cities that don’t welcome them and villages they can’t go back to, where was their future?  Their despair and suicide are easily understood.
 
It is Not the Responsibility of Scholars to Sing Praises
 
Xu Shuming: There are scholars who have said: We need to point out the various problems in national development, but we need also to acknowledge our successes, and on the basis of affirming these positive achievements, we can arrive at our own theoretical system.

Guo Yuhua: We certainly need to affirm social progress, but we mustn’t praise things to the stars.  Economic life in the country now has made major improvements, but what are the reasons for it?  Some people conclude that they are gifts of the Party and the government, and expect the common people to be constantly moved to tears of gratitude.  This is confusing cause and effect: first of all, you were raised by your mother and father?  Or were you raised by the Party and the government?  Are the improvements in the lives of the people are the results of their diligence and striving? Or were they a gift from someone? Next, who “raised” the Party and the government?  Wasn’t it the taxpayers?
 
China’s basic problem all along is that it’s never been clear who “raises” whom, which gives rise to all sorts of praise for famous leaders and miracle stories.  Under normal relations between officials and the people, when the government comes up with a decent policy people should affirm it, but they can also wonder whether there might not be something even better.  Are the “masses” who are continually and profoundly grateful really citizens?
 
Maybe if someone should do the work of singing praises, then the media, artists and official propagandists who are already doing it are enough.  We don’t need sociologists joining the chorus.  The responsibilities of sociologists are to seek out social problems and identify solutions.  This certainly does not mean that China’s future is bleak, but our basic duty demands that we maintain a critical consciousness, a spirit of reflection, and if we continue searching for the impetus and pathway for society to forge ahead, then this is enough.
 
Xu Shuming: People are always bringing up nationalism these days, arguing that this kind of positive propaganda for the government is something that all patriots should engage in. 
 
Guo Yuhua: This is harmful to the state.  Nationalist propaganda has nothing to do with discussing problems, to say nothing of coming up with rational solutions.  From the get-go they use terms like “traitors 汉奸” and “slaves of the West 西奴”.  Recently, even the official media have begun to use these terms.  This reflects a trend toward vulgarization in the mainstream media.  The result, however, has been to produce the opposite effect.  This sort of propaganda is unconvincing.


Translator’s Notes:
 
[1] “共产主义文明”的阴影——共识网专访郭于华”2013.  Consensus Net was suppressed by authorities in October, 2016, but a version of this interview is still available online at: http://ptext.nju.edu.cn/c7/2d/c13327a247597/page.htm .
 
[2] Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz, Mark Selden, and Kay Ann Johnson, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven :  Yale University Press, 1991); and Friedman, Pickwicz and Selden, Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (New Haven :  Yale University Press, 2007).
 
[3] Sun Liping (b. 1955) is a well-known professor in the Sociology Department of Tsinghua University, as well as a famous public intellectual. Professor Shen Yuan (b. 1954) is Deputy Chair of the same department at Tsinghua.
 
[4] Ying Xing (b. 1968) is Professor of Political Science at Tsinghua University, and specializes in the historical sociology of the early CCP movement.
[5] On the Dragon King, see Adam Chau, Miraculous Response:  Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2005).
 
[6] Yang Kuisong (b. 1953) is a well-known historian at East China Normal University in Shanghai, who works on the early history of the CCP.
 
[7] This famous directive announced a radicalization of Party land policy from rent reduction to “land to the tiller.” It is translated in Tony Saich, The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party: Documents and Analysis (Armok, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), pp. 1280-85.
 
[8] Li Dingming (1881-1947) was a non-Party member and a leading representative of the gentry of the Suide area of northern Shaanxi who served in the Communist-dominated base area government as a vice chair under the “Three Thirds System” of representation. in which government personnel would be one-third Communist, one-third members of other parties, and one-third unaffiliated. This was the moderate United Front policy of the Yan’an period (1937-47).
 
[9] “Outline of China’s Land Law” (October 10, 1947), translated in Saich, Road to Power, pp. 1295-98, dictated equal distribution of all the land in villages and resulted in a wave of violent expropriation and retaliation against village elites that was not curtailed until spring 1948. The flip-flop of policy supports Guo’s interpretation.
 
[10] Qin Hui (b. 1952) is an influential historian and public intellectual in China, now retired from Tsinghua University.  For his remarks on communes and concentration camps, see 秦晖, “集体化与被集体化 ,” available online at http://www.aisixiang.com/data/21328.html  .
 
[11] As with many local sayings, this comes from one of China’s famous traditional novels, Journey to the West, and refers to the golden band 金箍 around the Monkey King’s head that was used to control him.
 
[12] Also known as the “Four Cleanups 四清” campaign, this was launched by Mao in 1963 to “clean up” politics, economy, organization, and ideology of the Party, particularly at the village and local level. The Movement is now considered the first stages of the Cultural Revolution.
 
[13] Lu Xueyi was a sociologist associated with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and an expert on rural China.
 
[14] Hu An’gang is a professor of economics at Tsinghua University.  A firm supporter of the Chinese Communist Party, he believes Chinese socialism is superior to all other systems.
 
[15] These do not appear to be available on the web.