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Comparative Politics and Government

Notes official reaction against the disruption that characterized mass participation in the Maoist years
(especially during the Cultural Revolution), an official assumption that economic growth is
predicated on order and stability, and an official recognition that changes in economic relationships
require adjustments in political relationships.
The first category of rule changes involves political participation, which has become essentially
optional for ordinary Chinese since the early 1980s. In the first 30 years of communist rule, for a
broad range of political activities, failure to participate was considered tantamount to opposition to
the communist regime. Today, politics intrudes far less in the lives of ordinary Chinese. The scope
and demands of politics have shrunk. The single most important measure signifying this change is
the official removal, in 1979, of all class and political labels. After 30 years, Chinese are no longer
formally identified by class background or past “political mistakes.” Not only does politics no
longer dominate daily life, but in the diminished sphere of political activities, political apathy is no
longer risky for ordinary Chinese. Certainly, local leaders continue to mobilize people for some
activities (voting, for example), but political participation is no longer widely enforced in an
atmosphere of coercion.
The second category has been the assiduous avoidance by the regime to rouse the mass public to
realize policy objectives. In the Maoist years, by contrast, the quintessential form of political
participation was the mass mobilization campaign— intensive, large-scale, disruptive group action,
implemented by grassroots leaders. The Great Leap Forward launched in 1958 and the Cultural
Revolution launched in 1966 were essentially mass campaigns, on a gargantuan scale (with some
unique features, of course). Typically in mass campaigns, grassroots party leaders, responding to
signals from the political center, roused ordinary Chinese to achieve regime goals of various sorts,
often aimed at identified categories of enemies—such as “counter-revolutionaries” in 1950-1951,
the “landlord class” in 1950-1952, “rightists” in 1957, and “unclean cadres” in 1962-1963. Mass
campaign methods were adopted for nonpolitical objectives too, such as the ill-conceived and
ecologically harmful effort to eradicate “four pests” (sparrows, rats, flies, and mosquitoes) in 1956.
Participation in campaigns was virtually compulsory. In the highly politicized environment that
characterized all campaigns, lack of active enthusiasm was equated with lack of support for regime
goals. Although undoubtedly a burden for the vast majority, the campaigns presented opportunities
for the politically ambitious. For leaders at the grassroots, campaigns were opportunities to
demonstrate to their superiors an ability to mobilize the masses to achieve extraordinary results.
For some ordinary citizens, campaigns were opportunities to demonstrate activism and other political
qualifications that might gain them membership in the Communist Party. For a great many others,
however, campaigns were opportunities to settle personal scores by playing them out as political
struggles. Not surprisingly, many political campaigns were accompanied by violence, justified in
lofty political terms. Only three years after Mao’s death, Chinese leaders issued an official rejection
of mass campaigns as a mode of political participation. Many leaders who emerged at the top
echelons of power in the late 1970s had themselves been victims of persecution in the Cultural
Revolution. The social disorder of campaigns was rejected as antithetical to the new priority of
economic growth.
The third category was the rejection of mass mobilization as the dominant mode of political
participation. Chinese leaders have instead encouraged ordinary citizens to express their opinions
and participate in politics through a variety of regular official channels, some new, others newly
revived: offices of letters and visits, centers and telephone hotlines to report abuses of power, and
letters to newspaper editors, for example. Not least of all, the authorities have introduced important
reforms in elections. As a consequence, political participation in China is varied and extensive in
scope. In addition to the “officially acceptable” political activities noted above, Chinese regularly
engage in personal contacting of officials to voice their concerns and (less regularly) a number of
“officially unacceptable” activities: Table 12.3 shows findings from a survey conducted in Beijing
in the late 1980s. The extent of citizen participation in a wide range of activities— about a decade
after Mao’s death—is quite remarkable, not at all the picture of Maoist mobilization.

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