Focusing on cleavages amongst the components of the ultra-local ‘grassroots-state’, this dissertation examined state-society relationship in the neighborhoods [里弄] of 1950s Shanghai. After taking over Shanghai in May 1949, the Chinese Communist Party did not establish street government in the basic level of city administration. Party-state had learned from the experience of governing major northern cities before Shanghai that the desirable political institution at the grassroots is not a government, but dispatched agencies of municipal authorities. To be specific, street office [街道辦事處] of civil affairs and the police station [派出所] of public security became the official state organs in the neighborhoods.
At the grassroots in Shanghai, non-governmental organizations had been led by community elites such as landowners, merchants, Baojia-headmen [保甲長] to manage residents’ lives during wartime in the 1940s. Due to the urgent need to govern the city after the end of the civil war, these organizations and their leaders were allowed to continue to operate for a period. But the newly established Shanghai municipal government soon initiated an effort to reorganize all the non-governmental organizations in the name of “constructing governing system [建政]”, unifying their names and structures. The result was the establishment of Residents’ Committee [街道居民委員會] (hereafter RC) which took charge of the welfare of neighborhood community and connected its residents to the party-state. Ten to twenty households composed small groups [小組] and each small group had one representative [居民代表]. And the representatives composed Conference of Representatives [居民代表會議] to form RC, under which several specialized commissions provided various urban services and infrastructures for residents.
After all, the party-state in Shanghai designed the ‘grassroots-state’ operated by the non-governmental actors under the leadership of the official agencies of government. The duties of the street office and the police station were to oversee and guide the RC’s work for the neighborhoods. Though defined as a non-governmental organization by the party-state, the members of the RC served practically as state agents [幹部] who espoused the government policy and persuaded residents to support the party-state while also being responsible for providing welfare for their community. In archival documents [?案] they are commonly called neighborhood cadre [里弄幹部] not a professional position and without pay from the state. This clearly shows the major characteristic of the governing structure of the ‘grassroots-state’ based on the political involvement of the residents. The system, different from totalitarian or Weberian ideal- type of bureaucratic system, is derived mainly from insufficient capacity of the party-state in early People’s Republic of China as well as from the Chinese Communist Party’s particular commitment to the importance of people’s political voluntarism. The key to the system is how the state maneuvers the ‘voluntary’ politics of neighborhood organizations. In several campaigns [運動] launched after 1949, many cadres and activists [積極分子] in supporting the party-state were successfully cultivated in Shanghai neighborhoods.
In 1954, the municipal government began political rectification campaign at the grassroots of Shanghai city to assure strict control over the neighborhood and its organizations. Work teams [工作隊] were formed in each neighborhood to lead the campaign by the municipal government. The teams comprised officials from the street office, the police station and those from work unit [單位] were tasked with overseeing the career, class background, and work styles of the basic level cadres in preparing the re-election of the leadership of the neighborhood organizations. The individual history of each leader of the neighborhood organizations were exposed [交代] in front of the residents and those with a scandalous history or sullied reputation were punished. When the re-election of RC members occurred, the legal punishment or public accusation also resulted in the loss of their positions. The vacancies of the committees were filled with activists cultivated as supporters of the Party by the work teams. After the rectification was over, the party-state could eliminate old authorities from the neighborhood leadership and exercise political and ideological influence over residents on an unprecedented level.
In 1954 the party-state finally became sole authority with unparalleled power at the grassroots in Shanghai. However it cannot be said that political machinery of the neighborhood governance in 1950 exactly matches the typical totalitarian model. Even when leadership of the party-state was consolidated at the grassroots in Shanghai in the mid-1950s, cleavages remained within the ‘grassroots-state’ and its governance system. Even while re-election was going on, the work teams did not necessarily follow the directives of the municipal government regarding the implementation of “democracy” in appointing neighborhood cadres on their authority. The street office and the police station conflicted with each other to secure the human resources of the neighborhood community, insisting that one’s work has priority over the other’s. It led to a disorder [忙亂] in the governing system of the neighborhood with the state enterprises recklessly assigning projects to the street office and the RC. In the RC, the non-governmental but subordinate to the state leadership, the commission of public order [治安保衛委員會] caused systemic problem disregarding RC and obeying the order of the police station. Besides cleavages within the ‘grassroots-state’, the tendency of the party-state to gradually shift the responsibility of guaranteeing residents’ welfare to neighborhood community demonstrates that the local governance system at the grassroots of Shanghai was far from totalitarian. Even if campaigns with governmental initiative are ongoing, party-state tend to demand residents to take charge of welfare-related affairs in community. For example, in the labor-employment campaign, the municipal government actively provided job placement to induce unemployed residents to the positions in the neighborhood organizations and made them responsible for social services for residents. But once the rectification was over with neighborhoods having an adequate number of cadres, the municipal government persuaded unemployed residents to find jobs without government’s aid, just relying on their own efforts. The government even insisted that it is easy for Shanghai citizens to find a job without governmental assistance because they usually have adequate personal relations [關係], the unofficial way to acquire a job and the tradition of the pre-modern society that the party-state had eagerly worked to destroy. And in patriotic health campaign [愛國衛生運動] the work teams were composed of local people unlike the usual composition of work team whose members were state officials. Since 1956, the party-state reinforced the duty of the neighborhood community in caring about public sanitation with the establishment of a health care station [衛生站] in each neighborhood. The reason why the party-state let the grassroots to care for its own welfare, even under the governing system of ‘grassroots-state’ to assume powerful leadership of the state, was the deficient capacity of the party-state as well as an ideological belief of the Chinese Communist Party regarding the ‘voluntarism’ of people. When the responsibility to serve public welfare was placed on residents themselves, they could not help to accommodate it by diligently performing social service work for the community or depending on the traditional practices. This was a sort of restricted autonomy allowed to grassroots in 1950s Shanghai.
The feature of the Shanghai neighborhood had dramatically changed in the late 1950s. But further transformation of the grassroots society was predicted with the food allocation policy [粮食供應] in 1953. Since the party-state made decision to allocate food and control food market, residents had to buy allocated amounts of grain in state designated shops. With the food allocation rectification campaign [整風運動] proceeded to get ready residents for the socialist state.
The most important change at the grassroots of Shanghai is that industrial production was introduced in the neighborhood society. Until the Great Leap Forward Movement [大躍進運動] was launched in 1958, the neighborhood was not the place for production. The role of the neighborhoods and streets in the city was not production itself but ‘supporting’ industrial production by providing social services and welfare to workers and their families to make them rest after returning home and focus on their job at the workplace. However, once the radical drive for socialism was launched, the small factories began to be established in the street and residents had to participate in the secondary production organizing production team [加工生産小組] in the neighborhood. The profit of these productions was distributed based on the quantity of labor force and skill. The female work force was largely mobilized for production and the house work was collectivized in the name of liberating housewives as workers. Nurseries [託兒所] and collective canteens [公共食堂] were established extensively to lessen the burden of cooking and nursing for women. Also laundry, haircuts, and other services were supplied collectively by organizing ‘service team’ [服務組] or a ‘mutual aid team’ [互助組]. The literacy of residents was also cultivated by the party-state to educate them as capable workers. With the expansion of the scale of neighborhood organizations that is the RCs, considerable changes, which existing literatures consider ‘transforming the neighborhood society into work unit’ [單位化], occurred. The party-state intended to introduce the features of the work unit in the neighborhood by organizing the residents’ labor force for production, conceiving reasonable way to distribute profit and collectivizing the general welfare of residents.
Although the party-state initiated an effort to form whole grassroots society as organized work unit [單位] in the late 1950s, the reorganized structure and function of neighborhood were in reality different from what the party-state intended to establish. First, small industries in the neighborhood and street were limited to auxiliary role for factory and state enterprises focusing on producing handcraft manufacturing and secondary processing. Females who were largely housewives could not be formal workers like work unit employees. The works they generally performed were as contract or temporary workers. The party-state still emphasized women’s role as housewives even after they were mobilized for production. The quality of the collectivized services was inadequate to satisfy residents and several dilemmas about how to benefit and provide such services, to which the party-state did not provide obvious responses, existed. Most of all, the residents in the neighborhoods recognized their residential quater as quite different from work unit. They considered work unit as much better than the neighborhood and eagerly wanted to become factory workers [工人]. Even another rectification in 1959 could not overcome those differences with work unit.
In terms of state-society relationship, the peculiarity of the ‘grassroots-state’ of Shanghai was reflected in the old problems [老問題] that the party-state could never solve in 1950s. Even after the Communist regime was established, the capitalist family members [資屬] continuously participated in neighborhood politics. In the late 1950s the rapid drive for socialist construction resulted in organizing capitalist families as production teams. Though the municipal government incessantly advised the work teams and dispatched state organs at the grassroots to prevent capitalists from engaging in neighborhood affairs, they did not follow it and allowed capitalist family members to engage in community affairs as neighborhood cadres. The party-state emphasized the leadership of working class and the prevention of corruption derived from the capitalists’ class nature. But in the neighborhood the dispatched state organs had no reason to exclude capitalist family members with sufficient time and ability from doing work [工作] under the circumstance that cadres from the working class had been avoiding community affairs because of burden from their workplace. In short, despite the ideological cause, capitalists and their families were useful human resources for the neighborhoods.
Coercive [强迫] situations has always existed in the neighborhoods throughout the 1950s, in which state agents forced residents to perform public works. The coercion generated serious dissatisfaction with neighborhood politics. In the late 1950s, the coercion phenomenon degenerated into confiscation of residents’ properties. The neighborhood cadres carried away the residents’ properties or occupied houses without their agreement to establish production teams or use for collective canteens. The municipal government strenuously claimed that immediate return [退賠] was necessary but the grassroots cadres did not follow the suggestion of returning them. Even the district government [區政府] did not agree with the municipal government’s direction, asserting that the immediate return of ‘borrowed’ properties was practically impossible. The party-state’s demand to stop coercing residents was reasonable. But for the dispatched state organs and the neighborhood cadres, it was inevitable to mobilize residents’ labor forces and properties in the circumstance that reasonable reward was not provided for public work, thereby causing most of people to refuse devoting themselves for the community.
The disorder in performing neighborhood work was also one of the old problems at the grassroots of Shanghai. Every department [處] of the district government and various work units [單位] assigned work to the street office and RC with no appropriate plan and prior consultation. To avoid this disorder, the municipal government stated that the neighborhood organization was not an agency of the government and work units but it never worked effectively. As a result, too much work had always been allocated to the neighborhoods and it made residents tired and reluctant to be the neighborhood cadre. The party-state in Shanghai had initiated an effort to resolve the problem by establishing several control offices within the municipal government. However, the disorder continued to grow in the 1950s as a government being able to exercise adequate power to grasp the situation and plan for work had never been established in the neighborhoods and the streets except dispatched state organs. It proves that the deficiency of a government in street level causing the disorder remained unsolved, which was not the case in the district [區] level where the government was operating.
The qualification of the neighborhood cadres [里弄幹部] was also the unresolved problem in the 1950s. This question was not confined to lack of ability such as illiteracy. Their ideological limits and undesirable attitudes had raised far more serious problems. Members of the RC avoided the neighborhood work as much as they could, especially when the work was not about a campaign [運動] but about welfare or daily works in the community. A considerable number of RC members had the ‘only in name’ [掛名] problem which means that its members took position but did not actually work. The poor attitude of the neighborhood cadres was steadily worsening in the late 1950s when the Great Leap Forward Movement made increasingly the neighborhood residents exhausted. But it was inevitable that the neighborhood cadres displayed insufficient enthusiasm to satisfy the party-state’s demand for neighborhood work. Their position in the RC was not professional in the wake of which the cadres had not only to work for their workplace to make a living but also to work for neighborhood community with no pecuniary reward.
Establishment of the party branch [黨支部] at the street level could not resolve these old problems even though it practically reinforced the influence of the party-state upon the grassroots society of Shanghai. The inefficiency of the socialist state in resolving problems of the neighborhoods was mainly derived from ‘cleavages’ within the ‘grassroots-state’ system. As seen above, the ‘grassroots-state’ was composed of temporary work team, the street office, the police station, mass organizations, and the neighborhood cadres of the RCs and conflict between them had been sustained throughout the 1950s. Each component of the state had its own reason to pursue its objective with the ongoing chronical problems.
The ‘grassroots-state’ in the 1950s Shanghai was not monolithic but the mixture of components with separate interests, which was different from the perspective of prior studies. The cleavages identified within the grassroots state suggest a different perspective of state-society relationship in the 1950s urban governance system in China. The model that the Chinese Communist Party adopted to manage the grassroots society of Shanghai did not follow the typical totalitarian one or modern bureaucracy, which means that the multiple components of state operated in the neighborhoods conflicted with each other. This imperfect and discoordinated state structure and its operation implied the future development into the establishment of revolutionary committees in Shanghai neighborhoods in the wake of the outbreak of Cultural Revolution.