IDEOLOGY IN CHINA Martha E. Gimenez Department of Sociology University of Colorado at Boulder 1978 [Underlined text is represented in ALL CAPS] The politicization of everyday life and social organization that apparently leaves no room for marginality and social isolation appear to indicate that, in China, ideology plays a unique and exceptional role, unlike that which it plays in capitalist societies. The presence of political ideology not only in political rituals, uniforms, posters, and portraits of theoreticians and political leaders, but also in the speech of the people, in their analysis of everyday affairs and everyday life, is a striking contrast to the self-centered individualistic perspective to which we are used to. Ideology, in China, is not only something people read about in books but something that people seem to consciously live and experience. Consequently, visiting China leads Westerners to find obvious and radical contrasts, in that respect, with their own experience. In my view, however, the differences should not be taken for granted but carefully examined to see whether there are differences at all. It is my purpose in this essay to first relate my own experience and discuss the meaning of the following activities in which all people in China seem to be involved in one way or another: political work/ideological work/ideological education/propaganda. Secondly, I will explore the differences and similarities in the role of ideology in China and in capitalist societies. In the course of formal interviews with members of revolutionary committees and responsible persons in the places we visited, as well as in the course of conversations with our interpreters and other people, a series of statements, directives, goals, slogans, began to appear in a pattern that became more and more familiar as the days went by and our exposure to them increased. Reading my notes I find an extraordinary uniformity of political analysis. Reading Chairman Hua's report on the work of the Government delivered in the first session of the 5th National People's Congress, on February 26, 1978, entitled, "Unite and Strive to Build a Modern, Powerful, Socialist Country," I realized that a great deal of what I had heard was already stated in Chairman Hua's report. The main themes people incorporated in their analysis of the history, activities, and goals of the institutions in which they worked were the following: I. To grasp the key link of the class struggle--generally referred to when discussing changes and reorganizations. II. To struggle against the Gang of Four--to expose it and criticize it. The theme of the struggle against the Gang was all pervasive. Everywhere we went the briefings were structured along the following lines: a. before and after liberation (i.e., before and after the revolution). b. before and after the Gang of Four. III. To accomplish the general task facing the people in the new period of development in socialist construction and socialist revolution which implied the following: a. to continue the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. b. to deepen the three great revolutionary movements of class struggle, struggle for production, and scientific experiment. c. to transform China into a great and powerful socialist country with modern agriculture, modern industry, modern national defense and modern science and technology by the end of the century. Everywhere we went people mentioned the general task, giving emphasis to different aspects depending on the kind of activities in which they were involved. For instance, teachers in Shanghai University affirmed the need for deepening the three great revolutionary movements (while stressing scientific experiment) and also expressed great concern for the four modernizations. Another example: during the interview with three judges of the High People's Court of Shanghai, we were told that "the ideal is to correctly handle the disputes so the administration of justice will be helpful to the promotion of the revolution, to production, and will also contribute to the four modernizations of our country." The amazing uniformity of the political concerns expressed by so many different people in different contexts was something very interesting because it was so different from our experience. Most people in the U.S. never bother to read major policy statements, let alone use them as guidelines for coping with the problems of everyday life as well as with the issues and problems that emerge in the course of their occupational and professional activities. We were witnessing the results of what in China is called IDEOLOGICAL WORK. In China, great stress is given to IDEOLOGICAL EDUCATION or PROPAGANDA which is used to improve people's understanding of the political line and the policies considered important by the leadership at a given time. In his very impressive report, Chairman Hua states that political and ideological work must be strengthened to build up the ranks and raise the political consciousness of the workers, peasants, and intellectuals. The notion of PROPAGANDA, which for us has unpleasant connotations, was repeatedly used in connection to the need to disseminate policies and information to the masses. Propaganda means to educate the masses in the mass line developed around specific issues. It means to educate the masses in the direction the leadership considers useful for the overall development of the country and the well-being of the people. This includes, specifically, not only the transmission of information but the explanation of the issues themselves. This educational process is essential because the system does not seem to function on coercion but, on the contrary, on the basis of persuasion. Persuasion and education are the preconditions for successful policy implementation in China today. Family planning is a case in point. Hospitals have mobile teams of doctors who go to factories and the countryside to make family planning propaganda: i.e., to explain the benefits of family planning for the individual and for the collective of which the individual is a member, and for the society as a whole. To make propaganda also means to teach the masses the directives and slogans establishing goals in a variety of contexts. For example, a campaign to learn from the Tachai production brigade, or a campaign to do away with all "pests" (flies, sparrows, and other insects harmful to human beings and crops). The leadership learns from the struggles, successes, and failures of the masses and this experience is shared, praised, and communicated; the experiences are used as learning tools, as a basis for developing goals and creating a sense of collective participation and emulation. For instance, the slogan "to learn from Tachai" refers to a production brigade where the workers, using self-reliance, increased productivity well above expectations, disregarding material incentives in the process. People in communes and factories, in the process of stating their goals mention that they all have learned from Tachai and work in that spirit to contribute to socialist construction and the four modernizations. Summing up, I would say that ideological and political work comprehend to distinct tasks: 1. POLITICAL EDUCATION a. reading, discussion, and study of the Marxist classics and the writings of Chairman Mao. b. reading, discussion, and study of the political statements of the current leadership. This is reflected in the amazing diffusion of Chairman Hua's ideas as expressed in his report which, although reflecting many old political concerns, it states them in the rhetoric corresponding to the "new period." 2. PROPAGANDA This refers to the education of the masses through the communication and explanation of the mass lines developed around two kinds of concerns: a. the summing up of the experience and accomplishments of specific groups (e.g., production brigades, communes, factories, etc.). This kind of propaganda emerges from a process in which the leadership learns from the grass roots; from the exchange of ideas and experiences between the leadership and the masses which eventually lead to emulation campaigns carried out nation-wide. b. direct communications and explanations of issues and dissemination of information designed to create the subjective conditions for the successful implementation of policies devised by the leadership on the basis of its assessment of the country's national and international situation goals, and the needs of the people. A good example of this kind of concern is family planning. How successful is ideological work? How well does propaganda reach the masses? On the surface, they would appear to be enormously successful, but I have some reservations and unanswered questions about this. To illustrate these points, I will examine two instances of successful ideological and political work: population policy, and the campaign against the Gang of Four. POPULATION POLICY So far, population policies have met with what experts agree is an unprecedented success. For example, Lester Brown, director of the World Watch Institute, states that the decline in China's birth rate in the 1970's is the most rapid of any country on record and represents family planning's greatest success history. The commitment of China's leadership to family planning is such that it has achieved expression in the Constitution recently adopted (March 5, 1978). The Constitution's article 53 states: Women enjoy equal rights with men in all spheres of political, economic, cultural, social and family life. Men and women enjoy equal pay for equal work. Men and women shall marry of their own free will. The states protect marriage, the family, and the mother and child. The state advocates and encourages family planning (pp. 169-170). Essentially, the policy advocates LATE MARRIAGE, CHILD SPACING, FEWER CHILDREN, and BETTER CHILDREN. What is the content of the mass line in family planning? We discussed these issues throughout the interviews we held with "responsible" persons in the factories, communes, hospitals, and university we visited. They gave us the following information: The minimum legal age at marriage is 18 for women and 20 for men. Both sexes are encouraged to postpone marriage as long as possible. Once people marry, they are expected to have children right away but postpone the arrival of the second child for at least four years. People are encouraged to have only two children and, for that purpose, family planning is strongly advocated. Undoubtedly, ideological work alone could not convince people to adopt new marriage patterns, adopt contraception, space their children and have fewer children. The structural changes brought about by the success of the revolution did not increase the opportunity costs of children but increased collective benefits in ways that render meaningless the desire for large families as sources of economic and social security. Parents do see the benefits that accrue in the new order where fewer children become indeed better children through the education the collectivity is able to provide for them. The system of care for the elderly evolved after the revolution provides "Homes of Respect" for those who have no one to care for them. If what we were told is true, then ideological and propaganda work have been remarkably successful; at least the decline in the birth rate seems to agree with the successes claimed by our informants. The young people we talked to seem genuinely to believe that marriage had to wait, that their time now should be spent in work and study. Women in their middle and late 20's considered themselves too young to be married and some said they did not have dating experience. The younger generations will, of course, fit more easily in these patterns which for them, rather than the product of conscious political commitment, will become part of the natural order of things. The second example of successful ideological work is THE SOCIAL CREATION OF THE GANG OF FOUR AS PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER 1, replacing Confucius (who seems to be somewhat back in the good graces of the leadership) and keeping company with the "renegades" Lin Piao and Liu Shao-chi. Who are the members of the Gang of Four? The people who are today given that name were among the ten most important leaders of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). All four were members of the 4th National People's Congress that met in January, 1975. They are: Chiang Ching, Chairman Mao's wife for more than 40 years until his death, member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CCP, Director of Literature and Art for the Central Committee. Chang Chun-chiao, Senior Vice-Premier of the State Council, First Secretary of the Shanghai Party Committee, Director of the General Political Department of the People's Liberation Army, member of the Standing Committee of the Polit-Bureau of the Central Committee of the CCP. Wnag Hung-wen, Senior Vice-Chairman of the Central Committee of the CCP, member of the Standing Committee of the Polit-Bureau of the Central Committee of the CCP, Third Secretary of the Shanghai Party Committee, Director of the People's Militias. Yao Wen-yuan, Director of Propaganda for the Central Committee of the CCP, Second Secretary of the Shanghai Party Committee, Member of the Polit-Bureau of the Central Committee of the CCP. The struggle against the Gang of Four is portrayed as a struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; they are accused of having a counter-revolutionary line and being totally responsible for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. We were repeatedly told that, under the Gang's leadership, science, education, and culture sustained great losses. The Gang is depicted as anti-intellectual, ultra-right masquerading as ultra- left. We were told, for example, that the Gang was against intellectual development and research. The Gang had rewarded a student that did not know the answers to his exam and returned to his teacher, instead, a blank page. Actually, that student, whose name was Chang Tieh-sheng, was a hero of the Cultural Revolution who, as a production brigade leader, protested against entrance examinations that tried to exclude peasants and workers from the university. He was one of the leaders of a campaign conducted during the Cultural Revolution to struggle against the bourgeois exclusion of workers and peasants during examinations. Today, he is constantly given as an example of the excesses of the Gang of Four which, at that time, had attacked Teng Hsao- ping's (today a vice-premier and real power behind Hua according to political rumors) elitist approach to education. There are, as all China observers have pointed out, staggering differences between the way in which events and people were evaluated during Mao's regime and their current evaluation by the new leadership. Many accomplishments of the Cultural Revolution hailed by Western observers as advancements in the process of creating an egalitarian society are viewed by the current leadership as abominations that must be obliterated and replaced with precisely the same institutional arrangements then condemned by the masses under the leadership, not only of the today discredited members of the Gang of Four, but also Chairman Mao himself. The most striking example I found has to do with the assessment of China's economic performance during the last few years. Chou En-lai, for Premier, states in his report on the work of the government delivered on January 13, 1975, at the First Session of the Fourth National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China: We have overfulfilled the Third Five-Year Plan and will successfully fulfill the Fourth Five-Year Plan in 1975. Our country has won good harvests for thirteen years running. The total value of agricultural output for 1974 is estimated to 51% higher than for 1064. This fully demonstrates the superiority of the people's commune. While China's population has increased 60% since...liberation..., grain output has increased 140% and cotton 470%.... Gross industrial output for 1974 is estimated to be 190% more than 1964, and the output of major products has increased greatly. Steel has increased 120%, coal 91%, petroleum 650%, electric power 200%, chemical fertilizer 330%, tractors 520%, cotton yarn 85%, and chemical fibres 330%.... Reactionaries at home and abroad asserted that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution would certainly disrupt the development of our national economy, but facts have now given them a strong rebuttal (pp. 49- 50). Chairman Hua Kuo-feng's similar report delivered at the First Session of the National People's Congress of the PRC on February 26, 1978, gives an entirely different account: ...the destiny of our Party and country hinged on the struggle against the "Gang of Four." This counter- revolutionary clique of conspirators exploited the positions and power they had usurped to collect landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries and bad elements as well as a small band of careerists, renegades, new-born counter-revolutionary elements, gangsters and smash-and-grabbers to make havoc of the Party, army, and Country.... THEY SABOTAGED THE NATIONAL ECONOMY AND DISRUPTED SOCIALIST CONSTRUCTION IN EVERY FIELD. The consequences were extremely grave. As a result of their interference and sabotage between 1974 and 1976 the nation lost about 100 billion yuan in gross value of industrial output, 28 million tons of steel, and 40 billion yuan in state revenues, and THE WHOLE ECONOMY WAS ON THE BRINK OF COLLAPSE...production came to a standstill in factories, land was parcelled out to peasant households for individual farming, corruption, embezzlement and profiteering became widespread...(pp. 13-14; emphasis added). The Gang of Four was "smashed" on October 6, 1976; in the light of Premier Chou En-lai's glowing report on the economy, it is unlikely that economic matters had attained such state of disruption as Chairman Hua's report suggests in such a short period of time. One cannot but wonder about the truth or falsity of these statements and ponder the extent to which current assessments of the nature of political processes in China indicating that China has taken the "capitalist road" are correct. However, the issue I am mainly concerned with in this essay is not the content of the ideology but the form in which it is used. It is indeed an awesome feat to turn some of the most respected top leaders of a country into despicable counterrevolutionaries. It is not really known whether the Gang did commit "excesses" thus deserving the hatred of the people, whether the hatred people displayed while we were there and continue to display in the mass media is genuine, or whether there are struggles going on and protests against the inconsistency of the political lines fostered by the leadership through Peking Review and other Chinese journals and periodicals. I have discussed two examples of ideological work in China. Does ideology play a different role in China to the role it plays in capitalist society? A first approximation to this question on the basis of observation would lead the average Western visitor to achieving the following conclusion: China runs purely on ideology; ideology plays an extraordinary role there. Some of the things we saw produced veritable cultural shocks because of the quantity of diverse political messages to which we were exposed as well as because of the meaning some of those messages had for Westerners. For example, the ubiquitousness of Stalin's portraits and the spectacle of little school children doing the Mao salute and other political rituals in Tien An Men square noticeably bothered some members of our group. We also saw little red pioneers and little red soldiers wearing red arm bands and red bows as symbols of their membership, big quotations from Chairman Mao and Chairman Hua in every place we visited and in the streets, big political posters in the streets, and the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Hua everywhere, in the streets as well as in the briefing rooms of every place we visited. In spite of what the obvious might indicate, I would suggest that ideology operates in both capitalist and socialist societies along similar channels, fulfilling similar functions, but only up to a point in which there is a radical difference between the two types of social and economic organization with respect to the structural basis of ideology. As the Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci pointed out, ideology is the cement that holds society together. Societies are never held together by pure force, repression, coercion but, on the contrary, by legitimations of one kind or another. Sociologically, this issue of the basis of the social order is dealt with using the concept of value systems. Society is integrated and held together by the fact that its members are socialized into the culture, the language, the norms and values characterizing the social system at a given time. From the Marxist theoretical standpoint, the notion of value system is misleading for it overlooks the existence of class structures and struggles. As Marx pointed out, the dominant ideas in any class society at any given time are not the ideas of an abstract entity called society but the ideas of the ruling classes. In class societies, the dominant classes control the means of material production and the means of ideological/intellectual production. In that context, the fundamental role of ideology is that of reproducing the relations of production, that is, class relations. Each class, through the activity of a variety of institutions such as the family, schools, church, mass media, army, bureaucracy, etc. is reproduced to the extent its members are taught and learn in the practice of their daily existence submission to the rules of the established order, or ability to manipulate the established order to their advantage, depending on class position. People are not socialized into an abstract, relatively homogeneous system of values not taught value neutral ideas, items of knowledge or skills; it is through the very process of learning knowledge and skills that people learn the ideology that suits their role in society, whether that role is that of the exploited, the submissive, the marginal, the unemployed, or the powerful, the dominant. It is through the massive inculcation of ideology; i.e., the ideology of the ruling classes, that the relations of production are reproduced in class societies in general and capitalist societies in particular. It is relatively the same in China. The kind of institutions through which ideology is disseminated, taught, and learned are different although some are similar to Western capitalist institutions (i.e., family, school, church). Analytically, those institutions whether new (communes, revolutionary committees, children's palaces, neighborhood committees, etc.) or old do fulfil the same process of reproducing the relations of production. People learn to be a good communist soldier, peasant, worker, student, intellectual, etc.; and such learning is fundamental for the smooth functioning of the society. The similarity is formal, at the most abstract level of analysis. The main issues are: who benefits from the ideology? who controls the production of ideology? how overt is the action of ideology? In capitalist societies people have no control over ideology because it is embedded in the natural attitude towards the world that encourages a belief in the apolitical nature of life and reduces politics to the act of registering a vote and to the activities of professional politicians whom most people do not trust. The production of ideology and its dissemination are controlled by the ruling classes. The content and form of that ideology serves their interests and contributes to maintain class domination. In China, ideology production is controlled by the party and the leadership. Presumably, it serves the people because it contributes to educate them about ways or organizing and working that further their ability to control their environment and upgrade their standard of living. The campaigns about family planning, health education, learning from the example of productive brigades, etc., are examples of this kind of ideology that, while serving the interests of the leadership, serves the people and, at least theoretically, encourages them to develop their own potentialities for leadership. Furthermore, ideology is something open and obvious in China; something that people talk about. Politics permeates their lives through and through and their understanding of events is not one of experiencing subjection to phenomena out of their control and comprehension but, on the contrary, it tends to be the experience of hard struggles to learn how to control those processes and make them work for the benefit of all. Ideology in China seems to have such a powerful role because it operates at the conscious level--its current content is the contradictory reflection of the struggles of almost a billion people to stand on their feet and actively shape their world. In capitalist societies ideology operates at the level of the unconscious and reflects a successful pattern of domination that can blame the outcomes of class domination on ungovernable "laws of nature" (such as, for example, the "malthusian laws" determining famine and malnutrition) or an inherently greedy and selfish "human nature." REFERENCES Documents of the First Session of the Fourth National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975. Documents of the First Session of the Fifth National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978. _______________________ This is a very preliminary draft for a future essay on "Ideology in China." Some of the texts I plan to consult are the following: Louis Althusser, LENIN AND PHILOSOPHY _______________, FOR MARX Karl Marx, THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY Goran Therborn, SCIENCE, CLASS AND SOCIETY ______________, WHAT DOES THE RULING CLASS DO WHEN IT RULES? Talcott Parsons, THE SOCIAL SYSTEM Karl Mannheim, IDEOLOGY AND UTOPIA Frank Schurman, IDEOLOGY IN CHINA