The Chinese mass campaign in the post-Mao years

• Main Author: Fulker, Christopher Paul
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2011
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/30567

The Chinese mass campaign was originally formed in accordance with the Maoist vision of political participation. The "mass line" dictum enunciated by Mao Zedong required a relationship of reciprocity between the masses and the CCP in terms of evolving ideas, improving and amending them through discussion, and implementing decisions. In this participatory process it was vitally important that the masses freely and voluntarily express their own views. Originally, the mass campaign was a positive, pragmatic, and commitment-filled way of completing constructive tasks, one in which the masses themselves played an important role. The vision of participation prevailing at any given time has been a major factor in shaping the nature of the mass campaign. Central to a consideration of the character of participation is the degree to which the masses are permitted to play their independent, active, and integral role. Stemming from the period following the failure of the Great Leap Forward, this original conception of the mass campaign was increasingly corrupted by developing "bureaucratism" and "commandism" and actual mass involvement declined. With the basic tasks of socialist construction seen as completed, the mass campaign began to be used for "reforming the superstructure." Moralizing, lecturing, and behavioural modification were some of the tasks to which the mass campaign was put, as the achievement of social stability and public cooperation became important state goals. Leadership disunity resulted in the manipulation of the mass campaign for factional ends. Since the commencement of the post-Mao reform process, Chinese society has experienced increases in social disorder and in cynical, self-centred and apathetic public behaviour. In responding to these problems, the state has altered the use of the mass campaign to the minimalist one of a tool for social control. Leadership infighting and disagreements over policy direction and party "line" have become especially prominent since the end of the Cultural Revolution. Mass campaigns have been commonly manipulated by individuals and factions within the leadership in recent years; consequently, their administration and structure has become shoddy and their ideological direction haphazard. Campaigns of the 1980s have continued to display these and other trends. Limited to use as lecturing and moralizing tools, subordinated to economic concerns, manipulated by the leadership, lacking constructive or pragmatic goals, and featuring meaningless content, they are increasingly irrelevant to the masses. === Arts, Faculty of === Political Science, Department of === Graduate