Making Communism Work: Sinicizing a Soviet Governance Practice

Elizabeth J Perry

doi:10.1017/s0010417519000227

Abstract

AbstractAmong various grassroots governance practices adopted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), few have proven more adaptive and effective than the deployment of work teams—ad hoc units appointed and directed by higher-level Party and government organs and dispatched for a limited time to carry out a specific mission by means of mass mobilization. Yet, perhaps because work teams straddle the boundary between formal and informal institutions, they have received scant analytical attention. While work teams figure prominently in narrative accounts of the major campaigns of Mao's China, their origins, operations, and contemporary implications have yet to be fully explored. This article traces the roots of Chinese work teams to Russian revolutionary precedents, including plenipotentiaries, shock brigades, and 25,000ers, but argues that the CCP's adoption and enhancement of this practice involved creative adaptation over a sustained period of revolutionary and post-revolutionary experimentation. Sinicized work teams were not only a key factor in securing the victory of the Chinese Communist revolution and conducting Maoist mass campaigns such as Land Reform, Collectivization, and the Four Cleans; they continue to play an important role in the development and control of grassroots Chinese society even today. As a flexible means of spanning the center-periphery divide and combatting bureaucratic inertia, Chinese work teams, in contrast to their Soviet precursors, contribute to the resilience of the Communist party-state.

Highlights

This paper examines the origins and evolution of work teams in an effort to understand how the Chinese Communist Party fashioned this functional and flexible mode of central-local connectivity
POST-REVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENT As the Communist victory in the Civil War loomed on the horizon, Mao Zedong instructed field armies in the liberated areas to shift their focus from combat to occupation and mobilization, calling on the military in a 8 February 1948 telegram to “convert the army into a work team.”[54]. Some of the squadrons-turned-work teams carried out land reform in villages across the North China Plain; others were sent to Guangzhou, Shanghai, and other major Southern cities as socalled “Southbound work teams” (南下工作队)
Over the course of that protracted struggle, which took the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) across much of China’s remote hinterland, Mao and his comrades learned to refashion Russian revolutionary techniques into methods better suited to a far-flung agrarian context