Thought Reform and China's Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People by Aminda M. Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Thought Reform and China's Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People by Aminda M. Smith Maura Elizabeth Cunningham Smith, Aminda M. Thought Reform and China's Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. xi, 255 pp. $79.00 (cloth). In recent months, legal analysts have scrupulously examined the tea leaves of official Chinese statements on the decades-old institution of "re-education through labor" (laodong gaizao, or laojiao for short), hoping to spot signs of its imminent demise. Activist lawyers criticize the government's practice of interning dissenters, drug addicts, and prostitutes in laojiao camps, where inmates can spend up to four years toiling for the state while suffering physical and psychological abuse. Even Chinese officials have acknowledged the need for reform of the laojiao system, though cynics argue that current practices will simply be exchanged for another extra-legal apparatus. Laojiao emerged from the State Council's 1957 Decision Regarding the Question of Reeducation through Labor, and has remained more or less stable through today. This punitive institution, however, has origins in a more idealistic endeavor: the early-PRC effort to reform vagrants (a broadly defined group that included beggars, petty thieves, and prostitutes), facilitating their transformation from the lumpenproletariat into productive members of the People, with a capital P. As Aminda M. Smith demonstrates in her lucid and engaging new monograph, Thought Reform and China's Dangerous Classes, this earlier thought-reform drive was not intended to punish members of China's "dangerous classes" (p. 1), but rather to mobilize them. Smith begins with a careful analysis of the concept of the lumpenproletariat (Chapter 1), examining writings by Marx, Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Li Dazhao to explain how the CCP's inclusion of this group into its revolutionary activities diverged from the classical Marxist belief that such elements déclassés were simply parasites, incapable of taking part in the socialist transformation of society. In China, where the lumpenproletariat encompassed the vast majority of the population and nearly everyone suffered from "low consciousness" (p. 95) as a consequence of exploitation, pragmatism led Mao to take a more sympathetic stance toward the group and welcome its members into the CCP's forces, provided they were willing to undergo the necessary thought reform. The success of this meant that by 1949, "the claim that the Communist Party could transform vagrants into loyal members of the laboring People had become a core element of CCP propaganda and policy" (p. 16). After the Communist victory, city authorities in Beijing (where Smith situates her study) began the task of clearing the capital of its vagrants and placing people in internment centers (Chapter 2). CCP cadres drew a distinction between vagrants, who lacked a "laboring perspective" due to exploitation (p. 139), and Enemies of the People—landlords, capitalists, and counterrevolutionaries—who had perpetrated such oppression. While both groups were deemed capable of transformation through thought reform, Enemies were treated far more harshly from the start: in the early 1950s, vagrant internees spent most of their time in classrooms, studying texts about the happiness and fulfillment that would come about by dedicating their lives to labor and production. Though vagrants themselves might not have seen much distinction between being interned versus incarcerated, cadres insisted that "Wayward members of the laboring masses were entitled to care, compassion, and social relief; Enemies were subject to harsh punishments and a measure of violence" (p. 84). As Smith reveals, however, internees did perpetrate acts of resistance and were disciplined for doing so, indicating a more confrontational relationship between reformers and reformees than that spoken of in CCP propaganda. In Chapter 3, Smith broadens her view to explain how the re-education of vagrants fit into a national program of thought reform during the early 1950s. CCP cadres argued that due to the exploitation and oppression of the "Old Society" (p. 63), nearly everyone in China needed some degree of consciousness raising. Those in the dangerous classes, due to their extremely low level of consciousness, required a more intense dose and thus needed the constant thought reform that accompanied internment, but throughout the country, the Chinese were performing self-criticisms...