Class analysis has been central to the sociology of communism because of the broader disciplinary interests in social class and life under noncapitalist systems [Lane Reference Lane1982; Parkin Reference Parkin1969; Walder Reference Walder1986]. Studies usually modify Marx’s, Weber’s, or other common approaches to class to account for systemic consequences due to state domination of the political economy. “Neo-Marxist” studies emphasize patterned control of resources and redistribution sanctioned by the state and the resulting development of ruling classes [Djilas Reference Djilas1957; Konrád and Szelényi Reference Konrád and Szelényi1979; Nove Reference Nove1983]. “Neo-Weberian” accounts map political capital, educational achievement, and other individual characteristics to official mechanisms of stratification and distinguish classes of people with different access to jobs, services, and other opportunities [Andreas Reference Andreas2009; Dobson Reference Dobson1977; Kolosi Reference Kolosi1988]. A third tradition focuses on worker solidarity and its challenges in relation to state organization of production, political movements, leisure, and other aspects of life [Kenney Reference Kenney1994; Siegelbaum Reference Siegelbaum1999; Walder Reference Walder1986; Strauss Reference Straus1997].
By seeing class in conventional terms of relations of domination, structured inequalities, or shared consciousness, the accounts overlook a historic development of class under communism—that is, the emergence of “capitalists”, “petty bourgeoisie”, and other class categories based on Marxist critiques of capitalism, ironically enough, as capitalist and other unequal economic relations were abolished. Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick [2005: 71] calls these populations, which became highly visible in local society, Marxist classes. Contrary to Marxist theory, they “had nothing to do with the actual social structure [of production]” [7]; instead, they were constituted through official classification. Their appearance altered not only self-identities and social identifications, but also governance, marriage patterns, individual aspirations, and so on. In other words, compared to the uneven and often ambiguous expressions of class under capitalist rule [Wright Reference Wright2005: 1-2], class under communism had an unusually objectified dimension that penetrated virtually every facet of social life.
This article extends research on Marxist classes and underlines their destabilizing impact on class formation in the above conventional terms—in particular, through a study of the emergence of a “petty bourgeoisie” within a school system in post-revolutionary Shanghai. Like “the capitalist class”, “the working class”, and other phrases in the Marxist class schema of the Chinese Communist Party, “the petty bourgeoisie” (xiao zichan jieji) did not enter the Chinese language until the turn of the 20th century [Liu Reference Liu1995: 368]. Not long after the party seized power in the 1949 revolution, however, the petty bourgeoisie became a nationally recognized class category with members locatable practically everywhere by officials and ordinary citizens alike. The petty bourgeois was widely understood to possess political and moral shortcomings harmful to nation-building in general and the socialist project in particular. White-collar workers, government officials, and students; shopkeepers, small factory owners, and small farmers; and even soldiers, laborers, and housewives categorized themselves or were categorized by others, sometimes on a daily basis, as petty bourgeois.
There are two parts to my argument on the emergence of Marxist classes under communism. The first part contends that they were constituted above all by the bureaucratic struggle of the state to classify everyone with its class schema. When it comes to mechanisms of classification that established the classes, research has pointed up propaganda, censuses and registrations, and devices of “class” justice such as regulated access to jobs and redistribution of family property [Alexopoulous Reference Alexopoulous2003; Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick2005; Browning and Seigelbaum Reference Browning, Seigelbaum, Geyer and Fitzpatrick2009; Kraus Reference Kraus1981; Zhang Reference Zhang2004]. These accounts, however, barely address how the local authorities discovered or verified the class status of each individual with the available propaganda or survey information or before meting out class justice. The importance of such identifications cannot be overestimated, as they literally constituted Marxist classes person by person. The identification was especially challenging in urban areas, or where fortunes of individuals and families often fluctuated before and after the communist takeover, and freedom of movement facilitated manipulations of information to be disclosed to the authorities.
My focus on the bureaucratic struggle of classification begins with a political imperative of communist rule: the ruling regimes demanded that the right class subject hold the right position across the political economy to prevent counterrevolutions, because members of each class, official ideology alleged, tend to share specific values and interests. The regimes hence invested large amounts of material and symbolic resources to clarify or ascertain the class status of the individual on an everyday basis. I spotlight two forms of bureaucratic classification. Textual corroboration refers to the continual documentation of the family background, social association, work performance, private thoughts, and other aspects of the individual to enable the local authorities to determine her class status. Workplace ascription involved the authorities announcing or signaling the class status of the individual when organizing or supervising work and responsibilities on behalf of the socialist project. Although these tools of classification served to objectify Marxist classes, ambiguities in their official definitions, fluctuations of local practices, pervasive self-interests, and other factors of inconsistency or indeterminacy muddied individual class statuses and thus the local boundaries of the class categories.
The other part of my argument is this: the bureaucratic constitution of highly visible yet unstable classes of Marxist subjects rendered any “class-in-itself” or “class-for-itself” based on relations to production virtually impossible. Through textual corroboration, workplace ascription, and other classification techniques, the state forced upon each occupational group a divisive hierarchy of “class” subjects (e.g. “workers”, “capitalists”, “counterrevolutionaries”), on top of preexisting conflicts and other kinds of inequality. This not only changed personal fortune dramatically; poignant safety, authority, and other concerns common to life under communist rule prompted individuals to manipulate the classification, especially its gaps and ambiguities, to improve their own images, attribute motives and desires to others, and establish boundaries and alliances in unprecedented ways. The workplace, especially, became a socially contentious as well as symbolically productive space, or where similarities and differences based on the official discourse of class were constructed and contested. While such activities both reinforced and challenged the sovereign struggle to fit everyone properly into a Marxist category, they impeded the pursuit of collective interests.
This article brings together two literatures on class under communism. The sociology of communism has not considered Marxist classes in the analysis of class formation; research on Marxist classes has emphasized their emergence because of official classification, but not how it affected class formation in conventional sociological terms. The next two sections draw on Weber, Foucault, and others to offer an analytical framework for studying how bureaucratic classification objectified Marxist classes and their influence on class formation. I then show that textual corroboration and workplace ascription of class status in a Shanghai school system led to an endless flow of texts, signs, and cues that transformed faculty and staff members into putatively untrustworthy petty-bourgeois subjects. Various kinds of ambiguity and inconsistency in the theory and practice of classification paved way for self-interested manipulations and posturing, as individuals addressed their career, political, or other concerns. The petty bourgeoisie that emerged in the school system was an unsteady and divided population. The conclusion suggests that additional analysis of Marxist classes and bureaucratic classification can advance understanding of communist rule, especially in comparative terms.
Marxist classes and bureaucratic classification
All modern states create, maintain, and objectify social classes through systems of classification that affect resource allocation and social prestige (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1998). The Marxist classes normalized under communist rule are extraordinary in this respect, distinguished by their official character and obvious visibility. Weber’s theory of modern bureaucracy [1978] is a useful point of departure in unraveling such class categories beyond existing emphases on the roles of state propaganda, registration, or administration of class justice. His theory underpins studies of the formation of social categories and moral subjects [Bowker and Star Reference Bowker and Star2000; Loveman Reference Loveman2005; Szreter, Sholkamy and Dharmalingam Reference Szreter, Sholkamy and Dharmalingam2004]. The accounts reveal methodical classification by states, universities, and other professionalized establishments, or Weberian exemplars of modern bureaucratic organizations. Full-time officials, experts, and fieldworkers conduct observations, assessments, and experiments. They engage in documentation and negotiation as well as the standardization, dissemination, and enforcement of schemas of classification, all the while influenced by cultural assumptions and political conditions. Their classification influences ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, and acting, to the extent that “the whole pattern of everyday life is cut to fit” the visions of such organizations [Weber Reference Weber, Roth and Wittch1978: 223].
Foucault [Reference Foucault1977, Reference Foucault1988, Reference Foucault, Senellart and Burchell2007] delved further into the relations between bureaucratic classification and moral categories and subjects. He showed that when professional representations were combined with bureaucratic administration, madness, sexuality, and human conduct in general became scientific-cum-social issues, and individuals became knowable objects. Armed with a full-time staff, the state plays an extraordinary role in constructing categories and subjects with widely presumed traits. The state turns production, education, family, and other domains of life into objects of analysis. Organizational features and events, individual behavior and sentiments, and outputs and outcomes are recorded and categorized for control and development purposes [Li Reference Li2007]. This “conduct of conduct” seeks results at the level of population, but requires “an inflation of disciplinary techniques” aimed at the individual [Foucault Reference Foucault, Senellart and Burchell2007: 9], as she must be subjected to observation, examination, and classification as “the instrument, relay, or condition” of success of governance [42].
Although Weber and Foucault focused on conditions in capitalist societies, it was under communism that bureaucratic classification acquired unparalleled capacity, thanks to single-party rule and central planning with a universal schema of classes derived from Marxist ideology. Textual documentation is essential to any bureaucratic administration and, in particular, registration, examination, and other tasks of surveillance. The collected data become the basis for establishing social categories as well as assigning individuals to the categories [Foucault Reference Foucault1977]. I use “textual corroboration” to refer to official documentation under communist rule that was aimed at clarifying or ascertaining the class status of the individual. The records came in the forms of census and registration data, personnel reviews and performance appraisals, police reports and personal testimonies, and so on, often with the subjects’ cooperation or compliance [Chen Reference Chen1960; Dutton Reference Dutton2005; Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick2005]. The texts detail the family background, political association, work ethic, and other aspects of the individual generally based on the official understanding of class. Thoughts, dialogues, and movements and their related dates, places, and events were chronicled for classification purposes. In short, textual corroboration underpinned the “officialization” [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991: 224] of the Marxist class status of the individual.
I use “workplace ascription” to denote another critical bureaucratic domain in the assignment of class status to the individual. “Bureaucratic encounters” everywhere between state personnel and ordinary members of society form a major channel through which official classifications and their meanings and representations are disseminated and internalized [Dubois Reference Dubois and Jean-Yves2010]. Under communist rule, such encounters generally became part of everyday life, because communist party cadres dominated the management of factories, hospitals, schools, and many other establishments. The interactions between the staff and these cadres, who were trained by the state to enforce its division of classes to protect the socialist revolution, especially through reorganization of roles and responsibilities, engendered an abundance of signs and cues that announced or signaled individual class statuses.
The establishment of Marxist classes through bureaucratic classification was highly unstable because of political, intellectual, and institutional factors. The high stakes for the individual and her family led to a change of appearance, demeanor, occupation, documents, and so on, all of which thwarted the official plan to obtain complete knowledge of class statuses [Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick2005]. Because party cadres were placed in “a position of extraordinary power” [Weber Reference Weber, Roth and Wittch1978: 225], they exploited the classification for their own ends, including defeating competitors and challengers [Harris 2002]. Oftentimes, they were genuinely puzzled by official definitions of the classes or guidelines for classification and used their own understanding to make decisions [Browning and Seigelbaum Reference Browning, Seigelbaum, Geyer and Fitzpatrick2009; Kraus Reference Kraus1981; Schram Reference Schram and Watson1984; Zhang Reference Zhang2004]. Continual investigations and evaluations by the state sometimes led to class status revision. As well, the regimes periodically adjusted their own class schemas or meanings of the primary categories [Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick2005: 15]. That is to say, bureaucratic classification objectified Marxist classes as well as complicated their boundaries.
Marxist classes and class formation
After the decline of totalitarian theory of communism and its social-atomization thesis, the sociology of communism has employed overtly or otherwise the concepts of “class-in-itself” and “class-for-itself” to assess evolving patterns of domination, inequalities, and solidarity. The concepts privilege the location of the individual in the job structure. Class-in-itself underlines shared feelings, interests, opportunities, and resources among those who occupy a similar position; class-for-itself denotes their mobilization of such sentiments and assets for their own benefits. The major findings are: (1) the formation of any class-in-itself was fraught with problems because communist rule deepened gender, skill, sectoral, spatial, and political cleavages across the economy [Filtzer 2015; Lane Reference Lane1982; U 2007; Walder Reference Walder1986]; and (2) two dominant, overlapping classes-for-themselves appeared, that is, party-state officials [Djilas Reference Djilas1957] and intellectuals, notwithstanding that the latter were divided into technical and humanistic types [Konrád and Szelényi Reference Konrád and Szelényi1979; Andreas Reference Andreas2009]. The accounts, however, fail to examine how state conversion of everyone into a Marxist class subject, or the symbolic achievement unique to communist rule, affected the “objective potentiality of unity” [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1998: 31] or collective mobilization within or across occupational groups.
Despite occasional clues, research on Marxist classes, too, does not explain how their emergence affected class formation in the common sociological sense. Recent analyses explore the issue tangentially. In her study of Soviet Russia, Fitzpatrick [Reference Fitzpatrick2005] focuses on “individual fate and opportunity” and “individual practices of identity” [5-7] resulting from the rise of Marxist classes, and “tentatively” suggests that they “inhibited class formation” [71]. Browning and Seigelbaum [Reference Browning, Seigelbaum, Geyer and Fitzpatrick2009] note that the Soviet system of class identification led to the “inclusion, exclusion, and marginalization of social groups” [232], but do not illustrate how their constitution affected collective action. Likewise, in an account of land reform under Chinese Communist rule, Zhang [Reference Zhang2004] indicates that state conversions of economic capitals (or landholding) of households to symbolic capitals (or class statuses) of the members were intertwined with local struggles, but does not focus on the interests or relations within the rural class categories thus emerged.
In this article I suggest that the bureaucratic constitution of Marxist classes had an unmistakable impact on class formation under communism—that is, rendering any class-in-itself or class-for-itself virtually impossible. The ideal locus for building this thesis is arguably the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1969), which violently consumed trust, bonds, and lives on all levels after almost two decades of official constitution of Marxist classes. Specifically, state leaders, regional officials, writers, workers, students, and others embraced, manipulated, and challenged the class statuses previously assigned to themselves and others in a conflagration with ever-changing tactics, targets, and alliances [Lee Reference Lee Hong1978; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals Reference MacFarquhar and Schoenhals2006]. Here I turn more generally to the transition to socialism to elucidate the tendencies of the bureaucratic classification of class status to harm social solidarity within occupational groups, or how the classificatory struggle created widespread resentment, distrust, and alienation.
For one thing, the classification imposed upon each occupation a Marxist hierarchy of subjects (e.g., proletarians, landlords, counterrevolutionaries) that allegedly possessed dissimilar and even antagonistic values and beliefs. This reductionist view of social conflict and cooperation diverted negotiations of issues of fairness, justice, and equity away from substantive concerns of individuals and, indeed, suppressed their expression of such concerns. The hierarchy, moreover, was overlaid on two sometimes overlapping sets of cleavages and grievances. On the one hand, there were preexisting schisms caused by management style, political difference, personal conflict, and other matters. On the other hand, state appointment of personnel with unconventional qualifications to positions of authority to pursue the socialist project produced unprecedented rifts [Bailes 1978; Kuromiya Reference Kuromiya1998]. As individuals sought solutions for their concerns, maneuvers that tended to reinforce the divisiveness of the hierarchy multiplied.
Second, as class status became a dominant determinant of opportunity and welfare for individuals under central planning, they often deployed the official view of class and its ambiguities to guard their own interests at the expense of those of their colleagues. They mobilized the deeply politicized official vocabulary to portray themselves and others as specific types of class subjects, to establish boundaries or alliances, and to justify privilege and exclusions on the basis of the purported differences. Class status hence served as yet another, if not the most important, basis for practising domination and inequality. In short, the classificatory struggle initiated by the state promoted quests for personal distinction and advantage at the expense of the collective interests of occupational groups.
Third, any alliance formed within such groups was a precarious achievement so long as the state enforced a Marxist class hierarchy. Any cooperation of the members based on their comparable positions in the job structure was always mediated, if not undercut, by their interests linked to their respective places on the hierarchy. As well, every class status reflected but “a state of the struggle over classifications” [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991: 223] that occurred at multiple levels of state and society. The status was subject to revision, contention, and manipulation, especially as political and classificatory practice changed at any of the levels. Even when such conditions were stable, personal circumstances (e.g. political participation and educational achievement) and conduct (e.g. habits and attitudes), or criteria for official and unofficial adjudication of class status, continued to evolve. Allies and communities were constantly made and remade.
Rise of a divided “petty bourgeoisie” in socialist China
When the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) seized power in 1949, the leadership believed that Shanghai, the urban center of China, had the largest petty bourgeoisie that was useful yet dangerous for socialist development. In practice, even in the secondary school system, full of petty-bourgeois subjects according to official discourse, they only emerged because of the top-down work of construction. The study below illustrates that bureaucratic classification both created and fragmented the Marxist class category in the school system. It is crucial to summarize first how the leadership understood the petty bourgeoisie and, more broadly, class in China to grasp important rules of official classification of class status and, especially, challenges related to textual corroboration and workplace ascription.
The leadership borrowed the Marxist-Leninist thinking of the Bolsheviks and portrayed class in structural and dispositional terms, or respectively relations to production and attitudes toward socialist revolution and development. Structurally, the petty bourgeoisie was considered a population between the “exploiter classes” of capitalists and landlords and the “exploited classes” of workers, laborers, and poor peasants. Included in the petty-bourgeois category are white-collar workers, shopkeepers, farmers, and other kinds of people. Their participation in production is allegedly intermittent, small-scaled, or dependent on their own physical or mental labor compared to industrial work in modern, collaborative, and disciplined settings. Consequently, the leadership proclaimed, the petty bourgeois develops an outlook of “extreme individualism” and embraces self-interested, detestable values that belong to “the bourgeois ideological realm of private ownership,” in contradistinction to the collective, heroic, and revolutionary spirit instilled in or adopted by workers and, more broadly, the proletariat [Qin Yi Reference Qin1953: 2], in which the leaders included themselves and other members of the party.
At the individual level, the petty-bourgeois and other class statuses were assessed through three frames of reference—that is, family background (or the prerevolutionary source of livelihood of the paternal family), occupational standing (during the three years before the revolution), and political attitudes (toward ccp rule). The importance of each frame, however, fluctuated with leadership thinking and local practice [Schram Reference Schram and Watson1984]. Some classifications based on political attitudes nevertheless commonly superseded the class statuses supported by the other criteria. For example, the lionized “revolutionary soldier” or “revolutionary cadre” placed the individual in the ranks of the proletariat, while the classification of “military officer of an illegitimate regime” or “counterrevolutionary element” identified her practically as a class enemy of Chinese socialism [Kraus Reference Kraus1981]. The party also consistently separated individuals into different political types regardless of class status. The most common scheme distinguished the classified into progressive, middle, backward, and reactionary elements based on an official evaluation of how the individual approached ccp rule.
Like other class statuses, petty-bourgeois status was thus not automatically derivable from the individual’s relationship to production before or after the 1949 revolution. Instead, party cadres determined, case by case, whether the status was appropriate, with further work necessitated by the frequent changes in familial, occupational, or political circumstances of individuals during the preceding decades of war and disorder. In brief, pertinent rules of classification included: (1) the petty bourgeois is an undesirable class status generally applicable to a wide range of people; (2) the status must be revised when contradictory evidence of background or experience emerges; and (3) different political types exist within the class category.
The main sources that I use below are official documents of the Shanghai Education Bureau, the official agency that oversaw secondary education reform in the city after the revolution. Thousands of such documents are housed in the Shanghai Municipal Archives.Footnote 1 I selected documents that describe the ccp takeover of the bureau and secondary schools, and the investigation of personnel. Also chosen were reports on the work of party cadres and campus climates. Most of these documents were compiled during the early 1950s. Even on the basis of these parameters, the number of reports is still very large. My goal is not to present a comprehensive study of the classificatory struggle that produced highly visible petty-bourgeois subjects across the school system. Rather, the sources are selected to illustrate the core dynamics of the bureaucratic classification of class status and the effects on domination, inequality, and solidarity.
Textual corroboration of class status
The workforce in the Shanghai secondary school system changed dramatically after the ccp takeover. Previously dominated by college-educated personnel, faculty and staff expanded from 5,800 to 14,000 people within seven years, partly through the state-sanctioned hiring of former bank employees, government officials, shopkeepers, and homemakers, and even former military and intelligence officers of enemy regimes and capitalists and landlords (U 2007). The party cadres who were assigned to take over the system used multiple surveillance instruments to ascertain the class statuses of faculty and staff members to help determine their roles and responsibilities. The effort produced large amounts of documents.
On a broad ideological level, the class status assignment drew on official discourse and placed faculty and staff in the petty-bourgeois category. This led the cadres to widely reframe the professional, political, and other experiences of the individuals in order to substantiate the official designation. Numerous reports on campus personnel appeared during the early 1950s, each filled with terms and phrases that indicated various extents of self-centeredness, materialism, political apathy, and lack of discipline, or class attributes that the party leadership ascribed to the petty bourgeoisie. What happened at Wuben Girls Secondary School serves as an excellent example. Weeks after the Shanghai takeover, a survey that provides various levels of personal details depicts almost every faculty and staff member as a petty bourgeois. For instance, the head of instruction was criticized for being incompetent and self-serving and a potentially serious obstacle to socialist educational reform. One teacher was described as too “contented with his comfortable life” and showing no interest in any political issues. Another instructor allegedly complained about her work and life endlessly [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1949a].
The documentation turned up numerous cases of ambiguity of class status because of the triple official emphases on the family background, occupational standing, and political attitudes of the individual. In terms of family background, many did not fit the petty-bourgeois designation. Nine years after the takeover, for example, over 40% of faculty and staff in the school system were from “exploiter” families, while 6% were from “worker” households [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1958]. The same is true of occupational and political circumstances. After more than a decade of reform, Shanghai Secondary School No. 67 had seven former workers, six former capitalists, and one former landlord on its faculty and staff [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1964]. From time to time, the state labeled faculty and staff members as counterrevolutionary elements, but kept many of these alleged class enemies on campus. In 1955, over 600 counterrevolutionary elements worked in the rural section of the school system [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1955a].
Bowker and Star [1999: 223] use “torque” to highlight, among other things, “the twisting” of ordinary lives “when a formal classification system is mismatched with an individual’s biography, membership, or location.” She would be classified and reclassified with her life scrutinized, disrupted, and even redirected, regardless of her own understanding of who she is. Within the school system, continual examination and documentation of class status not only produced much torqueing by self and the authorities, but also complicated further the composition of the putative petty-bourgeois profession. The case of teacher Cheng is illuminating. She exploited the conceptual gaps and pace in class status assignment to reinvent herself, only to be prosecuted by the state as a class enemy. A longtime educator, Cheng reportedly came from a “capitalist-landlord” family and had worked closely with the ruling Nationalist regime. Dismissed by the takeover authorities after the revolution, she hid her family background and political connections and obtained an instructor position on a remote campus. That is, she passed herself off as an ordinary petty-bourgeois subject. A few years later, state investigation caught up with her. The authorities stressed, instead, her previous activities and dishonesty and sentenced her to labor reform as a “counterrevolutionary element” who had “wormed” her way back into the school system with ulterior political motives [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1957].
So long as documented evidence was available, “reclassing” [Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick2005: 75] by the state could occur more than once to the same person. The case of teacher Liang is instructive. An office clerk from a small retailer family, he was a prototypical petty bourgeois from the ccp’s perspective. Shortly after the revolution, he joined the People’s Liberation Army and therefore would become eligible by state regulation to be reclassified as a “revolutionary soldier” by the mid-1950s.Footnote 2 However, he accumulated a record of sexual assaults during his service and was later transferred to the school system, partly because of its need for instructors. Caught again for sex offences, he was reassigned by the authorities to “low-status” campus work. In short, Liang had had the enviable opportunity of elevating his class status officially, but was reduced to no better than a petty-bourgeois sexual deviant in the eyes of the authorities [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1956].
The party cadres in the school system, too, had their backgrounds scrutinized and documented. Their class statuses, including ambiguities, were not considerably different from those of the ordinary faculty and staff, because the state used cadres with relevant professional experience to take over major institutions. The cadres who took over the education bureau were former schoolteachers, white-collar workers, or high school or college students. As for family backgrounds, the five leading cadres were raised in “landlord”, “petty-bourgeois”, or “rich-peasant” households [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1950a]. In 1954, only three of 125 party-member deputy school principals came from one of the “exploited” classes [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1954a]. Furthermore, a minority of the cadres would have been categorized as a backward or even counterrevolutionary element had they not joined the communist movement, as the case of Principal Hu suggests. By the early 1950s, he had been punished for economic corruption, helping former Nationalist Party members to get jobs, and leading an undisciplined private life before arriving on campus [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1952].
Official documentation of political reactions, work performance, and other behavior also enabled the cadres to assign faculty and staff members, regardless of class status, to political subcategories handed down by the state, as a means to indicate the extent to which the individual supported ccp rule. The categories and their memberships were adjusted periodically to reflect policy and personal changes. For the faculty and staff, it gradually became clear that the categorization had long-term implications for class status. Shortly after the revolution, a minority were placed under a restrictive system of political “registration” and “control” or labeled confidentially “special-agent suspects”, which means that the state considered them potential class enemies. Everyone was subsequently placed into a subcategory, often with her knowledge. For example, six years after the takeover, Weiyu Secondary School had some 70 ordinary faculty and staff members, of whom 37 and 47% were “progressive” and “middle elements” respectively and the rest were “backward” or “reactionary elements” [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1955b: 48]. For those at the top, some would receive state-sponsored political training and even party membership, an asset that could be used to distance oneself from other “petty-bourgeois” members in the profession. By contrast, those at the bottom were one misstep away from being punished as a class enemy.
As a bureaucratic technique, textual corroboration of class status was vital to the ccp claim that petty-bourgeois subjects inundated the school system. The technique produced what Smith [1990: 83] calls “textual realities”, or a one-sided form of knowledge of each member of the system that reflected, above all, the organization of ccp rule. Ambiguous and unstable class statuses were nonetheless commonplace because of the multipronged official definition of class status, continual state surveillance, and manipulations by individuals. The symbolic inequalities thus inserted into the system were compounded further by top-down differentiation of personnel into predefined political types.
Workplace ascription of class status
The ccp leadership believed that members of the petty bourgeoisie, if left on their own after the revolution, would continue to serve the interests of the exploiting classes. As party cadres, all of whom had received training from the ccp, took over the school system, their reorganization and management of the system reinforced the representation of faculty and staff as generally being members of the petty bourgeoisie. In particular, the cadres created “social boundaries” that reflected the “symbolic boundaries” [Lamont and Molnár Reference Lamont and Molnár2002] the party had drawn around the class category.
The takeover of the education bureau by the ccp, which occurred concurrently with its seizure of Shanghai, established a precedent. The cadres dismissed more than 300 people, including high-ranking officials and veteran supervisors, many of whom were university graduates. Only 54 were kept temporarily in order to perform clerical or technical tasks. The dismissed were thus cast practically as petty-bourgeois or other inferior class subjects unfit for guiding socialist educational reform. Placement assistance developed to alleviate resentment further marked the displaced as inferior class subjects. Those who participated underwent political reeducation and saw their beliefs and behavior attacked during highly ritualized “thought reform” activities (e.g. lectures, reading assignments, mutual criticism). Sure enough, textual documentation of individual background and experience was part of the training. As a result of the scrutiny, a minority was handed over to the Public Security Bureau for investigation and punishment as potential counterrevolutionaries [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1949b].
The broad changes on campuses led by the cadres cast faculty and staff at best as petty-bourgeois allies of exploiter classes and imperialist powers. Swiftly abolished were curriculum items sponsored by the Nationalist government, including Scouting, military training, and civic instruction and their related classes, rituals, and events. These programs and activities were strongly influenced by Continental European, Anglo-American, and traditional Chinese models of education, and “could be variously characterized as liberal, Confucian, authoritarian or fascist” [Culp Reference Culp2007: 165]. The state now denounced the programs and activities as integral elements of an educational system that had supported class exploitation. Expansions of student enrollment to include “children from peasant and worker families,” which pushed their proportion from 12 to 26% within three years according to official statistics, reinforced the ccp complaint that the campuses had been serving mainly landlord, capitalist, and petty-bourgeois families. Likewise, termination of the teaching of Christianity and religious activities, takeover of missionary schools, reduction of English instruction, and mandatory tuition cuts in private schools linked faculty and staff members to the official representation of their complicity in the reproduction of class inequalities and imperialist domination in China [Lü Reference Lü1994].
In everyday interaction, the cadres often resorted to “elementary forms of domination”, or verbally, physically, or organizationally brazen tactics, that further signaled faculty and staff members as petty-bourgeois or other kinds of inferior class subjects. The tactics helped the cadres maintain their dominance, as “objective mechanisms” of its “self-perpetuation” had yet to mature [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977: 189-190]. For one thing, the cadres took over positions of authority in the school system not because of any conventionally acceptable qualifications, even when they had such qualifications, but because of state support. Second, the broad-based cadre training and selection process that the party had been developing to legitimize official appointments was still in a building stage. Third, because of their own petty-bourgeois background based on the official class schema, the only advantage in terms of qualifications that the cadres had over ordinary personnel was their heretofore participation in the communist movement. In other words, the cadres exploited this political difference, or the source of their professional authority, to the fullest in order to transparently enforce a moral division of labor.
The resulting cadre disrespect and abuse of faculty and staff turned them into visible objects of disdain. The education bureau observed that, from early on, campus cadres felt that their role in the political reeducation of school personnel was to find and punish wrongdoers as well as those who expressed support for the ideas of the exploiter classes [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1951]. Despite the fact that the bureau urged cadres to act in a firm but collegial manner, attacks against faculty and staff intensified. On one hand, this had to do with accumulating evidence of wrongdoing of faculty and staff members through persistent official investigation; on the other hand, it was linked to periodic political tightening by the state. Some cadres resorted to coercion and commands, and exhibited “brutal” behavior [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1954b and 1955b]. Some labeled faculty and staff members as “shameless” and “backward”, and even challenged whether they had sufficient qualifications to work in the socialist educational system [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1954c: 39]. Principal Ji at Yangjing Secondary School was a case in point. He was “arrogant and overbearing,” lashing out at faculty and staff during meetings and making no secret of his “disgust” toward the “backward elements” [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1953a].
The cadres practised social distancing, “a kind of informal ostracism” [Westphal and Khanna Reference Westphal and Khanna2003] against faculty and staff, generating “symbolic profit” for themselves [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1980: 122] of political and moral superiority. A common tendency of party-member principals was to pay little attention to instructional matters [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1953b], the core professional activity of their “petty-bourgeois” colleagues. A follow-up survey of nine campuses shows that none of the principals went “deep into classrooms or grade levels” to give lectures [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1954c: 54]. The cadres, instead, concentrated on work related to their role as political operatives, managing state-sponsored campaigns and personnel issues and investigations. That is, they played the part of officials but not of schoolteachers. Even when asked by the education bureau to take charge of the instruction of socialist politics for the benefit of students, some cadres still ignored the responsibility. At China Secondary School, for instance, the cadres used “unreflective campaign-like approaches” as a substitute, bringing in multiple visitors to speak to students without giving any lectures themselves [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1954c: 59].
Social distancing assumed other forms that turned faculty and staff members further into visible objects of distrust. The cadres tended to deny most of their colleagues any role in campus management. The above survey notes that party-member principals “to various extents held a narrow-minded and closed-door tendency toward the greater part of the faculty” [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1954c: 54]. At Nanyang Model Secondary School, for example, where the schism between the cadres and other personnel was “relatively serious”, the latter were not invited to any “executive or administrative meeting”. At China Secondary School, the cadres “threw the teaching staff to the side,” refusing even to recognize their pedagogical or professional experience when organizing political education courses for students [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1954c: 59].
The cadres often withheld support from faculty and staff members even as they encountered unfamiliar professional, political, and economic challenges brought about by the revolution. The disregard was as powerful as repudiation or marginalization in signaling inferior class statuses. What happened at Yan’an Secondary School is illuminating. The cadres failed to follow numerous state policies and recommendations. They “lack the compassion, regard, and patience to assist, educate, and develop” their colleagues, and “normally do not maintain contact with classroom instructors.” The cadres conducted political reeducation of faculty and staff in the most perfunctory manner, by merely passing on state instructions. The cadres not only ignored issues of housing, spousal transfer, and other welfare matters brought up by faculty or staff members; they accused the petitioners of having a “purely economic perspective to life,” or what the state observed to be a core mental habit of the petty bourgeois [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1955b: 35].
Faculty and staff members were not necessarily passive recipients of such everyday ascription of class status by the cadres. Some sought to change their own image. The case of teacher Chen reveals that various strategies were available. A former Nationalist official and son of a rural landlord, Chen had been identified as a counterrevolutionary element who defied state regulations and joined a “backward clique” on campus. He later changed his behavior in a public manner. He participated diligently in thought reform activities and state-sponsored campaigns, supported official policies and the campus cadres, and worked hard to become an excellent teacher. He reported on uncooperative colleagues and showed little sympathy when his father was punished by the state. Five years after the revolution, Chen was commended by the cadres as a progressive element, someone who had been battling allegedly debilitating class traits that had once shaped his opposition to the communist movement [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1955b: 53-54]. Against all odds, he became a trusted instructor in the petty-bourgeois profession.
Workplace ascription of class status brought the ccp schema of Marxist classes into everyday operation of the school system. Party cadre consistently signaled that faculty and staff members were petty-bourgeois or other kinds of inferior class subjects. At the same time, the cadres exploited their power to imply that they were, if not outright present themselves as, part of the proletariat in spite of their own largely petty-bourgeois backgrounds as recorded on official documents.
A deeply divided profession
As in studies of other socialist systems, research on ccp rule emphasizes that conflict and resentment intensified within occupational groups because state-led changes of authority structure and other practices led to controversial forms of inequality. In this section I place bureaucratic classification of class status at the center of this observation to further illustrate how the classification created tensions and schisms within the school system. In brief, the conversion of personnel into Marxist class subjects prevented the formation of a class-in-itself and therefore a class-for-itself.
After the ccp seized Shanghai, internecine struggles surged within the school system and took on Marxist symbolisms of class and revolution, as the authorities embarked on bureaucratic classification of class status. On the campuses quickly placed under the control of party cadres, some faculty and staff members appropriated the spreading official discourse of class to air “utter detests” against management and others. Offenses that the party considered integral to the rule of exploiter classes were brought up, including that of being a lackey of imperialism, repression of student protests again the Nationalist regime, collusion with police, and embezzlement, as were complaints that the takeover authorities allowed too many “reactionary elements” to stay on the campuses. In other schools, some pleaded for a takeover by party cadres to prevent the campus from falling into the wrong hands, or those who did not support the revolution [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1949c]. Although archival records lack information as to how prior tensions among colleagues affected their conduct during the takeover, the revolution unquestionably enabled formerly dueling colleagues to reframe their disagreements over management approaches or other matters with the class language of the party. They thereby presented themselves and others––wittingly or not––as certain kinds of class subjects.
Within the school system and other sectors where white-collar work predominated, thought reform (which included textual corroboration and workplace ascription) tore employees apart from each another as they were cast generally as petty-bourgeois subjects. Borrowed from the Soviet Union and practised widely under ccp rule, thought reform involved small-group meetings, political study, and other rituals and activities designed to foster what the ccp elites deemed to be socialist political consciousness. In particular, participants were forced to identify their own “class-based” conduct and dispositions through supervised mutual criticism. As a Shanghai account suggests, party cadres commonly used “crude and rash” approaches, intimidation, and stigmatization to extract compliance from participants [Qin Yi Reference Qin1953: 42], many of whom initially harbored dismissive attitudes toward thought reform and the cadres, or refused to be typecast as petty-bourgeois. When former ranking officials of the education bureau underwent thought reform, they “assumed an air of superiority,” questioned official ideas and measures, and “nitpicked at the words and phrases” of the cadres and other participants [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1949b: 11-12]. On the campuses, a “perfunctory attitude” prevailed. Some did not attend preplanned lectures or small-group discussions, read assigned material, or offer any opinion [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1950b: 8].
As the ccp executed and punished “counterrevolutionary elements” and others who resisted its rule, transparent animosity toward thought reform was replaced by mutual attacks between school personnel. Some castigated colleagues publicly to “elevate their own positions” and avoid being labeled a backward element or worse by the state. Their tactics included lashing out at fellow thought reform participants at every possible turn for what the state denounced as flawed, class-based conduct and dispositions, denigrating some further by fabricating “incontrovertible facts” of wrongdoing, and labeling others as counterrevolutionary elements or other kinds of class enemy. Attacks that sought “to even the score” became quite common. Damage to workplace solidarity due to calculated attacks lingered afterwards, in the form of ridicule, gossiping, backstabbing, and other tactics that sought to further constitute those targeted as inferior class subjects vis-à-vis their colleagues or the authorities [Qin Yi Reference Qin1953: 43-48].
The conflicts sometimes led to factionalism, again in response to the opportunities and inequalities created by the bureaucratic classification of class status. What occurred at Dunhua Primary and Secondary School is an example. The leading party cadre, Principal Pan, was openly abusive, partly because official investigations had revealed that one-third of faculty and staff had worked for the Nationalist regime. Her management style, which included paying little attention to academic matters, created space for a minority of personnel to band together as the “progressive faction” and to target what they called the “backward faction” of the faculty and staff. As a result, “mutual attacks and quarrels had been very intense” with regard to work, authority, and other issues. For the so-called progressives, the prize included a potential party membership, which many probably regarded as a stepping stone to joining the proletariat, given how the cadres in the school system had been presenting themselves through their behavior. The fact that this campus, unlike other schools, had yet to recruit any of faculty or staff members into the party helped bolster the expectation [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1955b: 76-80].
At the management level, any community of cadres that the ccp leadership expected to emerge was hampered by mutual distrust from their own objectification as Marxist class subjects. On one level, the authorities who ran the school system, as noted earlier, were aware that some campus cadres had dubious backgrounds. In most cases, these cadres had been warned or punished for wrongdoing that included lack of discipline, corruption, or providing assistance to a family member who had been identified as a counterrevolutionary element. The authorities doubted whether these cadres had sufficient socialist political consciousness to accomplish their work and continued to monitor them closely. When appropriate, they transferred them to other posts or meted out further punishment. For instance, deep concerns were expressed about Principal Chao’s appointment. His father and grandfather had been sentenced as “hegemonic landlords”, and his mother had also been punished too. He was found to have secretly assisted an uncle who was a former ranking official in the Nationalist government [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1952: 7-8]. To his superiors, Chao’s background and conduct made him untrustworthy.
More generally, the authorities regarded the abuse and disregard of faculty and staff members by campus cadres as a consequence of their inferior, class-based habits, and related only secondarily to their lack of professional experience or qualifications. Following official discourse, the education bureau subsequently raised abuse and disregard to the level of “problems of styles of work” (zuofeng wenti) [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1954b; 1955b]. This is an umbrella phrase that the ccp elites invoked to criticize what they deemed to be petty-bourgeois and other inferior approaches to governance [Teiwes Reference Teiwes1979]. The bureau singled out “subjectivism” and “bureaucratism”. The former refers to cadres relying on personal experience to handle work and people rather than learning and practising the party’s “proletarian” approaches. The latter means that cadres lorded over faculty and staff members and showed little commitment in uniting with them to advance socialist educational reform mandated by the state. In short, like campus cadres, the managers of the school system used their higher offices to elevate themselves politically by depicting their subordinates as inferior class subjects.
Even though the authorities did not explicitly label the above-mentioned Principal Pan as a petty bourgeois, they used language that placed her squarely in the category. After arriving on campus, she “gradually has become very arrogant” and “blindly complacent” in handling work. On one side, she “does not rely on [the advice of] the party and its organizations,” refusing to learn about and implement related policies for schools. On the other side, she brushed off even “well-grounded ideas and assessments” from faculty and staff members, and therefore lacked understanding of their serious morale problems and conflicts with one another. Pan displayed “the syndrome of a self-styled hero” (geren yingxiong zhuyi). This was a stock phrase in the ccp vocabulary. It highlights what the regime believed to be an extremely self-centered orientation commonly found in members of the petty bourgeoisie, especially well educated ones. Pan was “subjective, inflexible, and irascible.” She wanted her own “personal rule” on campus and “grandiose achievements to make herself noticeable” to her peers and superiors. Little wonder that the bureau recommended “severe criticism” of Pan by the party [Shanghai Municipal Archives 1955b: 76-80].
In the conventional sociological sense, the similar family backgrounds, economic opportunities and, to a significant extent, professional responsibilities of school system personnel made them a potential class-in-itself. In practice, the bureaucratic classification of class status conducted by the state derailed this possibility shortly after the revolutionary takeover. Party cadres and others alike exploited the official discourse of class and local circumstances to acquire symbolic profits for self-protection or other purposes. The gains and losses came at the price of social solidarity within the school system.
Toward a comparative analysis of Marxist classes and bureaucratic classification
This article seeks to further class analysis in research on communism. The sociology of communism uses class mainly as an analytical category to illuminate patterned domination, inequalities and collective actions. Research on Marxist classes sees class as a “practical classification” [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991: 220] that permeated state and society. My goal is to bridge these otherwise separate literatures with the existing sociological insight on the capacity of modern bureaucratic organizations to objectify social categories and moral subjects. I have pointed out (1) the state’s attempt to classify all individuals in terms of predefined classes as the most important institutional basis of Marxist classes, and (2) the detrimental impact of their emergence on the prospect for class-in-itself and class-for-itself. The article illustrates the roles of two bureaucratic mechanisms of classification in these regards.
My focus on how bureaucratic classification objectified Marxist classes does not replace previous emphases on the constitutive impact of state discourse, surveys and registrations, and mechanisms of class justice. The analytical shift, instead, helps to illuminate the “micro-foundations” of those other objectifying instruments. The reservoir of information on the individual gathered during the bureaucratic struggle of classification in document or other forms reinforced the narratives, categories, rewards and penalties promoted by the discourse, survey and justice instruments. To be sure, my argument that Marxist classes were constituted bureaucratically is not meant to suggest that communist regimes established legal-rational governance, or the basis of a Weberian bureaucracy. It is, however, my contention that such classes would not have appeared had the state failed to develop particular features of modern bureaucratic administration, or regular record-keeping and supervision, job specialization, and long-term career. These features supported extensive official surveillance and appointment and, in turn, engendered a constant circulation of texts, signs, and cues essential to the appearance of Marxist classes in local society.
While I agree with the insight from the sociology of communism that state domination of production led to extraordinary schisms and tensions that thwarted class formation, I have drawn attention to the much-neglected objectification of Marxist classes and its impact on occupational groups. Recovering the protean use of class as an everyday identification leads me to posit a more complex and unstable picture of conflict and cooperation compared to the ones previously depicted. Within the Shanghai school system, bureaucratic classification of class status transformed personnel into members of different Marxist classes and hence created new political divisions and inequalities at all levels, as well as deepened existing schisms. As everyone was forced to deal with her own legible yet manipulable class status, maneuvers for self-preservation or advancement––which frequently involved targeting colleagues––intensified cleavages and resentment. Class defined by the state became the dominant motif that organized, merged with, and disguised other kinds of conflict.
There are several limitations in my study with implications for future research on the emergence of Marxist classes, especially in comparative terms. First of all, I have focused on the classificatory struggle in an institution that was relatively homogeneous with regard to social composition and character of work. Struggles in settings where the occupants had diverse backgrounds and responsibilities (for example, any large factory or construction site), or where various class categories emerged in close proximity to one another, would involve additional dynamics in terms of class status verification, ascription, and manipulation. Indeed, studies contain clues that the struggle varied substantially across sites. Edgar [Reference Edgar2001] shows that in Soviet Turkmenistan during the mid-1920s, where genealogy and ethnicity had been bases of rural organization, power holders exploited a poorly planned campaign of class status assignment and an official strategy of appeasement to strengthen existing ethnic and kinship divisions. That is, the bureaucratic classification initiated by the state was practically captured by outside interests.
Second, although my account of bureaucratic classification indicates that party cadres encountered ambiguous official definitions of classes, fluidity and opaqueness of personal circumstances, and other challenges when assigning class statuses, I have not delved into these issues of classification. Nor have I explored how the cadres handled multiple alternatives of class status, disputes or interference from the classified. The broader issue here is the conduct of the state as a classifying agent beyond the deployment of formal principles, rules, and methods or other symbolic or material resources. What kinds of local structures, knowledge, and practice mediated the classification? To what extent did they serve or impede state efforts to classify everyone as a class subject? Zhang [Reference Zhang2004] confirms further the necessity to consider the local dynamics of the classification. Party cadres in a rural Chinese county in the early 1950s seemed to enjoy much autonomy. They interviewed residents and pored through related records, ignored official rules of classification, invited input from the local population, invented their own categories, and took bribes from farmers who wanted a desirable class status.
Third, my account of the official assignment of class status focuses on the impact of post-revolutionary institutions and circumstances (e.g. workplace control by party cadres, thought reform procedures, and management style). I have not addressed how pre-revolutionary beliefs and conditions influenced the rise of Marxist classes in local society. Fitzpatrick [Reference Fitzpatrick2005] suggests that the Bolsheviks’ success in establishing Marxist classes was partly attributable to an official discourse that harked back to the defunct system of social estates (soslovie). Perry [Reference Perry2012] indicates that early ccp leaders took advantage of local values, beliefs, and rituals, worked with local elites and gangs, and invoked traditional idioms and rhetoric to promote revolutionary messages to ordinary people, which included the schema of Marxist classes. In other words, it is crucial to study how state agents appropriated symbolic resources, institutional structures, and social capital developed before the communist takeover to establish Marxist classes during the classificatory struggle.
More broadly, the most influential but still inadequately understood aspect of Marxist classes was “categorical work” [Bowker and Star Reference Bowker and Star2000: 285] at various levels of state and society, or the ways in which the official class schema were received and then reproduced and modified as well as debated and challenged on an everyday basis. What Fitzpatrick observes in her study of the first two decades of Soviet Russia—that is, the “imagination of class became a societal and individual preoccupation” [2005: 34]—occurred across other socialist systems. My study merely points to a thin layer of categorical work, or specific forms of bureaucratic classification in a Chinese school system and some local reactions. We know relatively little about how such work by individuals or organizations was developed, organized, accomplished, or challenged other than the broad strokes of it mattering greatly in virtually every aspect of social life from work and governance to friendship and romance, especially during the transition to socialism. We know even less of variations in calculus and tactics across different domains such as education, art, and the family.
Finally, unraveling the evolution of Marxist classes is another pathway to a further understanding of communist rule in comparative terms. Even with respect to Eastern Europe, where research on Marxist classes has been rare, state expropriation of private property with an “ideological category of ‘working people’” against “the middle classes and the nobility,” based on “mass mobilization and repression on a substantial scale” (Kolář: 205, 208), could not but create such classes. What happened with Marxist classes after their emergence seems to differ greatly across countries. For example, Hungary, which “opted for the most ‘consistent’ and ‘liberal’ economic policies” in Eastern Europe [Seleny 2006: 64], presents a case as interesting as any others. State-led reform apparently mitigated the reproduction of Marxist classes as early as the mid-1950s. Amid twists and turns, the “professionalization” of Hungarian economics [17] required state de-emphasis of the class backgrounds of experts; and agricultural de-collectivization reintroduced private ownership and market exchange. Moreover, ordinary people sought incomes, goods, and services in a thriving informal economy via acts of “complicity, trust, and mutual masking” [22] that further weakened the class divisions that the state had imposed upon society. Does this mean that Marxist classes disappeared from or lost their relevance shortly in the Hungarian socialist system? If not, how did they continue to matter? To what extent were individuals and organizations forced to adapt to the changing narratives and symbolisms of Marxist classes and implications of their related classifications?
In sum, the emergence of Marxist classes under communist rule was a multilayered phenomenon underpinned by the bureaucratic struggle of the state to classify everyone as a class subject. Analyzing this struggle is vital to researching the issue of class in socialist societies; equally important, the investigation opens up new pathways for understanding state-society relations. A fertile area of study awaits further exploration.
