Rebels, the WPT and Power Misplacement

Workers, together with Red Guards, played a central role during the first two years of the CR in Shanghai. The extant literature on the role of workers in the rebellion movement falls into two perspectives. One is that radical leaders at the top used worker rebels as an instrument to eliminate veteran cadres. This view contends that the power seizure campaign that first swept through Shanghai in 1967 and then rolled out to other provinces was ordered by the regime.Footnote ¹⁰ Rebels’ actions were facilitated by Mao's fiat or authorized by the Great Leader.Footnote ¹¹ The second school of thought views the worker rebellions as a form of labour activism responding with independent initiatives to opportunities created by the CR.Footnote ¹² It depicts the CR as a “big democracy” that spurred workers to challenge the bureaucratic behaviour of China's new officialdom and increased workers’ power in workplaces.Footnote ¹³ Despite their differences, however, both perspectives agree that at that time, the working class demonstrated a power that had never existed before the CR.

While both views capture important elements of the truth, they offer limited explanations for the WPTs. To be sure, we cannot separate the rise of the WPTs from the workers’ rebellion movement of 1966–1967. It was the workers’ aggressive role at that stage that convinced Mao of the working class's potential to transform the superstructure and inspired him to form the WPTs. Building upon the momentum of worker mobilization during the rebellion movement, the WPTs recruited many members from among worker rebels. However, they differed from rebel groups in that they were not spontaneously formed by workers themselves. Although Elizabeth Perry and Li Xun describe them as a “vehicle for expanding the political influence of worker rebels,”Footnote ¹⁴ the WPTs were not of the workers’ own making. They were created by Mao and his radical colleagues to accomplish certain political goals as well as fulfil the Party's ideological commitment to enhance the role of the working class.

Politically, with the intensification of Red Guard rebellions and the resultant paralysis of the Party's organizations, universities and schools were out of control. To achieve the immediate goals of filling the leadership vacuum, ending the anarchy and restoring order, Mao turned to the workers as well as the soldiers, as they were considered as politically reliable. Yet Mao's move should not be seen as purely an ad-hoc measure to take back control of a chaotic situation. Following sweeping political reshuffles at the top of the Party since the beginning of the CR, Mao and his radical colleagues were eager to push forward their agenda at a societal level, especially in superstructure units they perceived to be awash with “unreformed intellectuals.” Mao believed that changing the composition of superstructure units – a fundamental long-term goal of his continued revolution – entailed the permanent presence of the working class in these units. He metaphorically termed this policy as “mixing the sand” (into the hardened soil) (can shazi 掺沙子). According to Mao:

The WPT movement also embodied Mao's ideological vision for the role of the working class. As a revolutionary populist, Mao had deep faith in the enormous potential of the masses.Footnote ¹⁶ Concurrent with the Marxist doctrine on the sublime role of the proletariat, Mao regarded the working class as the most far-sighted, most revolutionary and most selfless class.Footnote ¹⁷ Even though the Chinese revolution was reliant on peasants, Mao maintained the view that the working class was the most advanced class.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet post-revolutionary China was witnessing a widening gap between the state's ideological promises about the status of workers and reality, a gap that engendered workers’ resentment and triggered protests in 1957.Footnote ¹⁹ Mao attributed the workers’ unrest to bureaucratism and to Party officials losing touch with the workers.Footnote ²⁰ As the CR dramatically unfolded from 1966 onwards, Mao rediscovered the revolutionary potential of workers, revealed in their proactive participation in power seizure campaigns, and brought them to the political forefront. Believing that China's continuous revolution entailed the proletariat's incessant struggle against the bourgeoisie, Mao saw the working class as the decisive force to break up the bourgeois intellectuals’ domination of the superstructure and eradicate their influence. Mao's view of the working class also paralleled his anti-intellectualism and his strong conviction that intellectuals were an appendage of the old traditions, which needed to be reformed, re-educated and controlled.Footnote ²¹ His mobilization of the masses, especially the workers, was driven by his ideological mission to “minimize the consequences arising from the division between domination and subjection” and “chang(e) the pattern of participation of the dominated in the political process.”Footnote ²²

The WPT significantly as well as symbolically underlined the Party's intention to empower the working class. It channelled the spontaneous power of the workers, unleashed from the rebellion movement, into an official format that would make the leadership of the working class a reality, producing “a peculiar system of governance” that performed oppressive, supervisory and transformative roles.Footnote ²³ Such an experiment empowered the working class in a way that had never existed in any other Leninist state. All such states, including China prior to the CR, while claiming to represent the working class, had suppressed workers’ collective role in society. Nevertheless, the worker power created by Mao differed fundamentally from labour movements in other social contexts, where the power of workers was rooted in economic relations and based on workers’ autonomous association. Contrived by political elites and disassociated from workers’ own interests, the WPT was a misplacement of worker power that only served Mao's CR agenda. The attempt to use workers to control and manage the superstructure brought insurmountable challenges for the Party as well as the WPTs themselves.

First, the WPT movement was a social misplacement of worker power in that it positioned workers in a domain far removed from their education, experiences and interests, and assigned them duties to which their capabilities and knowledge could not adapt. In his theory on socialism, Marx had anticipated that the proletariat would be able to take control of the industrial system that it would inherit following the inevitable socialist revolution.Footnote ²⁴ Mao went further to assert that the working class's revolutionary character and consciousness warranted its leadership in social domains beyond industry. However, placing ordinary workers in leadership positions within the superstructure units, which had long been run by experienced cadres and bureaucrats as well as experts and trained professionals, constituted a grave disruption of the former routines of governance. It pushed anti-intellectualism to the extreme by completely negating the difference between mental and manual labour. Many WPT members themselves were frustrated by their own inability to work comfortably in this unfamiliar environment and by the intellectuals’ dissatisfaction with them. This study shows that the WPTs tried to overcome the predicament of social misplacement by taking an approach that accentuated “red” over “expert” and fiercely attacked any doubts about workers’ capability in ideological terms. However, the approach to defending social misplacement by justifying anti-intellectualism only exacerbated the WPTs’ predicament.

Second, the WPTs signified an organizational misplacement of worker power as its leadership role in superstructure units conflicted with the Party's Leninist organizational principle of centralized control. Mao's anxiety about the bureaucratization of the Party and government motivated his drive to reorganize the party-state through mass mobilization. Workers were called upon to take over the superstructure where Party organizations had been dismantled in the mass movement. Yet, while asserting the leadership role of the working class, Mao as a Leninist never intended to dismantle the Party's monopoly on power. Thus, when he re-emphasized the imperative of asserting “the Party's unified leadership” (dang de yiyuanhua lingdao 党的一元化领导) to normalize the functions of political institutions, the WPTs became confused about their relationship with Party leadership. It also caused an operational mess that plagued the WPTs. The Leninist party organization was fundamentally centralist, operating through a monolithic unity and a clear hierarchy of authority.Footnote ²⁵ However, the WPTs operated outside the Party's structural framework and had no clear organizational affiliation. There was also a lack of any corresponding agency to manage the numerous WPTs with clearly defined operational rules and procedures.Footnote ²⁶ This study demonstrates that while maintaining its rhetoric on the leadership role of the working class, the Party addressed the problem of organizational misplacement with Leninist logic by incorporating the WPTs into, and subordinating them to, Party organizations.

Occupying the Superstructure: From Rebels to Enforcers

When the CCP Central Committee issued the notice dispatching WPTs to all universities and schools on 25 August 1968, the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee (Shanghai shi geming weiyuanhui 上海市革命委员会, SRC hereafter) responded quickly and decided to send WPTs first to all the universities and then to “all places where intellectuals pile up,” as Zhang Chunqiao 张春桥, the chairman of the SRC, put it. Zhang asserted that the CR must settle the problem of the intellectuals, for “if it is not resolved, the CR will not be considered a complete victory.” By March 1969, 90,000 workers had entered 1,971 work units, including 28 universities, 513 middle schools, 1,249 primary schools and all public health agencies, cultural entities, publishers, newspapers, science research institutes, financial institutions and trade agencies (see Tables 1 and 2).Footnote ²⁷

Table 1: Statistics of WPT Members in Universities and Colleges, 1970

Table 2: Statistics of WPT Members in Other Units, 1970

The WPTs were subordinate to the SRC, while the Workers’ General Headquarters (gong zong si 工总司, WGHQ hereafter), the city's only legitimate worker rebel organization absorbed into the municipal authority as a replacement for the abolished Shanghai General Trade Union (Shanghai shi zonggonghui 上海市总工会, SHGTU hereafter), was responsible for organizing the WPTs and selecting its members.Footnote ²⁸ Political loyalty was emphasized as the primary criterion. Rebel activists would be given priority. As appropriate educational levels and work skills were considered necessary for those who would head the WPTs, some “revolutionary cadres” and technicians from factories were also recruited.Footnote ²⁹ According to a report submitted to Mao by the SRC, thousands of “liberated” factory cadres were recruited to the WPTs, accounting for 3–4 per cent of all members in Shanghai. The same report showed that many of those cadres were of worker origin and had been veteran workers before being promoted to workshop directorships.Footnote ³⁰ These workers were usually given leadership posts in the WPTs. However, as the WGHQ noted, some factories were not keen to send key members of their workforce and instead used the opportunity to get rid of older workers and those with health problems or poor shopfloor relations.Footnote ³¹

Having been granted substantive power, the WPTs were used as a political tool by the Mao leadership to restore order, eradicate dissent and force through political campaigns within the superstructure.Footnote ³² Within the first few months of their entry into the university campuses, the WPTs aimed to end the factional conflicts among students. They held numerous compulsory study sessions for Red Guard activists. Faction leaders were forced to engage in “criticism and self-criticism” and to renounce factionalism; one-to-one thought work was also conducted to mediate conflicts between student activists from rival factions.Footnote ³³ The WPTs were also instrumental in policing campuses, ordering Red Guard groups to hand over weapons used in violent clashes, punishing vandalism and preventing conflicts. Eradicating dissent among students and faculty members was another important goal. Ever since Zhang Chunqiao became the head of the SRC, there had been anti-Zhang sentiment and activity among university students who accused him of taking power without the will of the people.Footnote ³⁴ In response, Zhang accused those who opposed him of “bombarding the ‘proletariat command’” and hinted that a strike was necessary. The WPTs carried out searches for anti-Zhang materials, first at Shanghai Normal University on 4 September 1968 and then at Fudan University the next day. Over 1,000 WPT members were involved in the so-called “9-5 revolutionary action” at Fudan, which targeted 5,000 faculty members and students.Footnote ³⁵ The WPTs’ third task was to wage political campaigns. In 1968–1970, two major campaigns – “Cleaning the class ranks” (qingli jieji duiwu 清理阶级队伍) and “One strike, three fights” (yida, sanfan 一打三反) – were enforced throughout the superstructure under WPT supervision. At Fudan University, for example, the WPTs launched numerous “struggle sessions” across departments. Fudan zhanbao 复旦战报, the-then campus newspaper, regularly reported on which “bad apples” (“class enemies”) were uncovered in what department as evidence of the WPTs’ achievements.Footnote ³⁶ A large number of faculty members, including some of the country's most famous scholars as well as Party functionaries, were identified as enemies of different categories.Footnote ³⁷ In the meantime, the WPTs were instrumental in implementing the government's radical educational policies, such as class background-based university admissions and school-run factories.

The WPTs were crucial to Mao's CR agenda for the superstructure. They ruthlessly enforced the CR policies throughout the superstructure in a style somewhat informed by workers’ previous experience of rebellion, victimizing many innocent people as well as implementing radical policies. Although the WPTs’ actions were not the workers’ own initiative or driven by their own interests, they gave workers a strong sense of empowerment.

Social Misplacement: Pride and Frustration

The founding of the PRC has been portrayed as the moment when workers were liberated from the oppression of the capitalist system. They were designated not only as the masters of their enterprises but also of the country. However, as noted earlier, aside from being the principal beneficiaries of the employment and welfare system, workers’ political influence was marginal. Thus, when Mao declared that “the-working-class-must-lead-everything” and sent them to “occupy” the superstructure, workers were exhilarated and felt that, at last, they were taking on a real leadership role. Such sentiments were reflected in the words of WPT members:

Workers’ pride in their WPT membership seems to imply that it was only then that they felt like they had truly become the leading class, a political status promised by the regime since 1949. Moreover, they had never dreamt that they would be given the power to exercise control over the superstructure. Nevertheless, running the superstructure was different from rebelling against capitalist roaders in factories and the street. Assigning ordinary workers a significant leadership role within superstructure units challenged the common-sense assumption that running modern institutions requires educational credentials, expertise, specialist knowledge and administrative experience. The educational profiles of WPT members exposed the gap between their capabilities and their assigned roles.

Tables 3, 4 and 5 show that the majority of WPT members had only received a very basic education. But since WPT membership was not only politically selective but also required a certain level of educational attainment, it can be assumed that those selected were considered to be the “most qualified” among the worker population. WPT members had felt comfortable carrying out political campaigns but now felt increasingly out of their depth with their new role, which was at odds with their educational level and background. Their frustrations were recorded in some WPT documents and briefings:

Table 3: Educational Level of WPT Members in the Shanghai Cultural Bureau, 1974

Source: File B244-1-466-48.

Table 4: Educational Level of WPT Members in the Education and Health Bureaus, 1974

Table 5: Educational Level of WPT Members at Fudan University, 1972

As one official document indicates, the feeling of incompetence was prevalent among WPT members. Even some WPT leaders grew tired of their duties. For example, the head of the WPT at Shanghai First Medical College openly expressed his opinion that the superstructure was not a place to stay for long and that it was his intention to leave as soon as possible.Footnote ⁴⁶ In January 1969, the Municipal No. 3 Office of the WPT reported that team members felt dispirited and that morale was low. The report revealed that more and more people were requesting to return to the factories – for example, 30 per cent of the team members of the East China Research Institute of Computer Technology WPT submitted written requests to return to their factories.Footnote ⁴⁷ Some wished to do so because it was only the workers on factory duty who were eligible for a 13-yuan monthly bonus.Footnote ⁴⁸

While it was rare for intellectuals to openly challenge the WPTs, from reading between the lines of some official reports and documents, it is clear that they were sceptical about the ability of workers to function effectively in superstructure units. Intellectuals’ dismissive attitude towards the WPTs can be detected in their criticisms as reported in official documents:

The WPTs employed three strategies to overcome the predicament of social misplacement and rebuff intellectuals’ criticisms. First, they attempted to frame such tensions in terms of ideological conflict. In late 1968, Fudan zhanbao carried a series of articles criticizing the view that laymen cannot lead experts. In its annual report of 1973, the WPT headquarters of the culture and education sector in Shanghai also fiercely attacked this view and depicted it as anti-WPT and a manifestation of the two-line struggle in the domain of culture and education. It asserted that “we should not fail to lead because we do not understand the professions” and “if we cannot win in professional domains, the working class will lose the leadership of the superstructure it has just gained.”Footnote ⁵³ The WPT in Fudan even held a rally to “fight back against the anti-WPT countercurrent” on campus.Footnote ⁵⁴

Second, the WPTs promoted propaganda highlighting cases of workers who had been able to adapt to their new role in the superstructure through their own personal efforts. One such case described Ms Shen, a middle-aged worker of very limited education (she had attended night school for several years) who was dispatched to the Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House. According to an official report, Ms Shen worked hard to improve her theoretical understanding, reading Marxist classics as well as the works of Mao. It particularly highlighted her extraordinary efforts to read Marx's On Capital (Vol. 1), which was supposed to be very hard for workers with low levels of education to understand. Ms Shen was endorsed as a model WPT member by Ma Tianshui 马天水, the-then municipal Party secretary.Footnote ⁵⁵ Similar stories of exemplary WPT members were publicized to showcase how they had endeavoured to overcome educational barriers and had read “six Marx, Engels and Lenin classics.” Reading these theoretical texts enabled them to “equip themselves” to properly carry out their assigned political duties.Footnote ⁵⁶

Third, the WPTs also promoted the narrative that revolutionary consciousness was more important than professional knowledge when running the superstructure. The personal experience of a WPT member in the foreign language section at Shanghai Railway College was highlighted as evidence of workers’ capability to lead the “revolution in education”：

In another case, a WPT member assigned to a publisher was praised for demonstrating his ability and political sensitivity when identifying problems with a manuscript under review:

In sum, the WPTs used ideology to overcome the predicament of social misplacement. Nevertheless, using ideological judgement as the sole standard for academic and professional work only indicated that the barriers facing the WPTs in the superstructure were insurmountable. Actually, during the “educational revolution” in the early 1970s, when universities and schools were compelled to rewrite textbooks and redesign courses, even those that were largely ideologically based, WPT members found it hard to engage owing to their limited educational level.Footnote ⁵⁹ In a report to the municipal leadership, Ye Changming 叶昌明, vice-chairman of the SHGTU, conceded that although the WPTs had played an important role in political campaigns, they were unable to deal with matters related to the professions, technology and education, and actually had no say in decision making related to these matters.Footnote ⁶⁰

Organizational Misplacement: Who was to Lead?

WPTs entered superstructure units during the most chaotic period of the Red Guard rebellion. They were mandated to exercise authority that had previously belonged to Party organizations and were tasked with restoring order and carrying forward various political campaigns. In the beginning, the WPTs’ power and authority were undisputed. Mao's “working-class-leads-everything” mantra provided the most powerful justification for the WPTs’ leadership role, while the paralysis of Party organizations seemingly necessitated the exercise of their authority. However, while some workers interpreted Mao's words in a literal sense, tensions quickly emerged over the role and power of the WPTs in light of the CCP's absolute power in the political system. There was a sentiment among WPT members that Party organizations were no longer necessary now that the WPTs were in charge: “without the leadership of grassroots Party organization in the past few years, everything was working as well as before.” In the winter of 1969, Gongren zaofanbao 工人造反报, the official newspaper of the WGHQ, published a set of articles rebuffing the literal interpretation of “working-class-leads-everything.” One article reaffirmed Leninist theory on the relationship between the Party and class.Footnote ⁶¹ Another argued that the leadership of the working class could only be effectively realized through the actions of the Party leadership and asserted that “the-working-class-leads-everything” mantra ultimately meant Party leadership:

However, despite these attempts at a rhetorical clarification of the relationship between the working class and Party leadership, in practice the WPTs’ relationship with Party organizations was considerably more complicated within the workplace. Initially, since the Party organizations had been dismantled, the WPTs were fully in charge. As a former Party secretary of one university recalled:

From late 1969 to 1971, following three years of turbulence, Mao appeared to decide that it was time for a return to some degree of political normalcy. With his re-emphasis of the importance of the Party's “unified Party leadership,” Party organizations began to be re-established at workplaces. A sarcastic saying circulating among WPT members reflected their frustration: for workers, “the grand coalition is to seize power, the triple combination is to decentralize power,Footnote ⁶⁴ and the establishment of the new Party committee is to hand over power.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In order to stay on track with Mao's new emphasis on the Party, Gongren zaofanbao published another series of articles in early 1971, this time criticizing the idea that the working class had an independent role to play and linking that view to Liu Shaoqi's 刘少奇 revisionist line.Footnote ⁶⁶

Nevertheless, since WPTs had been the de facto authorities, their relationship with the newly re-established Party committees was unclear and became a delicate issue. For example, some WPT members at Shanghai Jiaotong University complained that it was not easy to manage their relationship with the Party organization; they were not sure what meaningful role they would have once the Party organizations had regained authority. At the same time, the Party committee at the university admitted that it had never concerned itself with the activities of the WPT as the WPT had been sent in by the leadership and was not organizationally subject to the school's Party committee.Footnote ⁶⁷ In addition, the Party committees in factories which had dispatched WPTs no longer felt that it was their responsibility to take care of those workers.Footnote ⁶⁸ Also, tensions arose when the WPTs disagreed with the Party organizations over certain specific issues. In 1974, an anonymous letter to the authorities accused the-then Party secretary of Shanghai Foreign Language College of being “anti-WPT.” The Municipal Party Committee sent a work team to the college and conducted a 70-day investigation. The team found that friction had arisen owing to a suggestion by the Party secretary that students be given more academic training; some WPT members criticized this as heading in the wrong direction.Footnote ⁶⁹ Ye Changming's report pointed to the dilemma that WPTs were faced with amid the restoration of Party organizations:

Ye's report also complained that the lack of any clear organizational affiliation undermined the authority of the WPTs. They had virtually no supervisors: they were not subject to the factories that dispatched them nor the Party organizations in the work units to which they were sent, nor any other superior agency. Indeed, as the Party leadership was reinstalled in superstructure units, WPTs were put in an awkward position and ended up being sidelined as a leadership group. For example, the Party Congress of Jiaotong University in 1973 declared that “the WPTs will play a political role under the leadership of the Party committee so that the Party's unified leadership will be guaranteed.”Footnote ⁷¹

However, since the top leadership had no intention of withdrawing the WPTs, it chose to reconcile the Party's unified leadership with the leadership role of the working class. The strategy was to incorporate WPT members into Party organizations and revolutionary committees. On the one hand, this strategy could be seen as evidence of the Maoist leadership's continued commitment to the role of the working class – as the right way to maintain working-class leadership, according to official ideology. On the other hand, it allowed the Party to address the problem of organizational misplacement by reinstalling Leninist organizational principles, which subordinated the WPTs to the Party. It brought a change in the status of the WPT – from an organization that had once exercised power in its own right with a mandate from Mao, to one that was losing its semblance of political primacy.

According to a report submitted by the SHGTU to the Municipal Party Committee, by the end of 1973, 731 of the 1,538 WPT members in 18 universities were appointed to Party and revolutionary committees at both university and departmental levels. Jiaotong University reported that 75 per cent of its WPT members had been incorporated into the Party organization in this way.Footnote ⁷² By 1974, of 10,713 WPT members across 1,935 superstructure units, 731 had been absorbed into Party leadership bodies. With the incorporation of their members into Party committees, the WPTs came to be subsumed by the Party establishment and no longer operated as independent leading bodies in superstructure units. One of the direct results of this change was a dramatic reduction in the size of the WPTs, from a membership of over 100,000 in 1968 to around 10,000 in 1974. The majority of those who were not Party members or who failed to secure appointments within Party organizations despite being Party members returned to their factories, while the remaining WPT members not taking Party leadership posts were largely marginalized. Some were even assigned to do logistical and clerical work.Footnote ⁷³

The drastic downscaling of the WPTs indicates two things. First, as a political tool created to control superstructure units and force through various political campaigns, the WPTs had largely accomplished their immediate goals. Second, at a time when the Maoist leadership was seeking to return to the politics of normalcy, the misplacement dilemma loomed larger. The WPTs gave way to Party organizations. Nevertheless, while the incorporation of members into the Party establishment reduced the autonomy of the WPTs, their continued existence did have important implications: it enabled the Maoist leadership to at least appear to be abiding by its ideological commitment to the role of the working class as the leaders of society, and it allowed workers to retain at least some degree of political influence in the superstructure.

Despite their diminished role in superstructure units, the WPTs did not entirely lose their relevance as a political force. This was because, in the mid-1970s, radical leaders dragged the Shanghai WPTs into the power struggles being waged in Beijing. At that time, as Mao's health deteriorated, the factional conflict in Beijing over the leadership succession was intensifying. Shanghai was the birthplace of the “Gang of Four” (si ren bang 四人帮) – three of whom came from the city, including Wang Hongwen 王洪文, the-then vice-chairman of the CCP who had risen to power as a worker rebel leader in 1967. Wang Hongwen maintained enormous influence over the city's industrial workers, and many of his friends occupied key positions in the municipal leadership. To consolidate and expand their power base in struggles with veteran cadres, radical leaders supported by Mao contrived to promote workers to key positions in both Party and government. The WPT members were regarded as a reserve army of cadre candidates. In a speech in December 1974, Wang Xiuzhen 王秀珍, the deputy secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee who had also risen to power during the worker rebellion, indicated that Shanghai would select more cadres from among WPT members and recommend them to the centre. She implied that this was the intention of the Maoist leadership: “Before the Fourth National People's Congress, the centre needs cadres and asks Shanghai to provide more vice-ministerial level cadres … We have thousands of WPT members and can provide cadres for the centre … Mao trusts Shanghai workers very much.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In his 2015 memoir article, Ye Changming confirmed that Mao personally approved the plan to recruit worker cadres from Shanghai for central and local governments; he also recalled that in Shanghai many cadres at municipal and lower levels were selected from WPTs.Footnote ⁷⁵ But again, as mentioned earlier, the promotion of individual workers into the Party and government establishment was not so much a process that increased the actual power of the working class as a byproduct of the elite politics of the time.

Conclusive Remarks: The Lessons of the WPT Experiment

The leadership role of the working class remained as ideological rhetoric rather than a reality in all countries that ruled in the name of workers. Mao's attempt to empower workers during the CR indeed created a unique form of worker power under the Leninist system. Through the WPTs, the Chinese working class gained great power during the period from 1968 to 1976, wielding levels of political influence unprecedented not only in China since 1949 but also unheard of in all Leninist states. However, the experiment was, ultimately, circumscribed by the Party's Leninist doctrine concerning its relationship with the working class. According to this doctrine, the party-state fully represented the interests of the working class via the official trade unions and hence workers no longer needed their own independent organization. Therefore, despite the Party allowing workers to mobilize at the beginning of the CR and then later organizing them into WPTs, it had no intention of endorsing a workers’ autonomous organization that could represent and defend the workers' own interests. Instead, the Party empowered workers to achieve the Party's own particular goals. The worker power created in this context eventually suffered from both political and economic failures.

Since worker power, as a tool of the political leadership, derived from the mandate of the political leadership, it was vulnerable to changes in power politics at the top. With Mao's death and the fall of the Gang of Four in 1976, the CR came to an end. The role of WPTs was immediately questioned. In a discussion with the minister of education in September 1977, Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 emphatically expressed his opinion that “the WPT problem should be resolved.” In November, the CCP approved a report by the Ministry of Education that requested the withdrawal of WPTs from all universities and schools. Soon after, the WPT presence in other superstructure units was also dismantled. To avoid the potential political repercussions of this dramatic reversal while the post-Mao leadership was still consolidating its power, the Ministry of Education report praised WPTs for “having contributed to the restoration of order in universities and schools and socialist education” and for having “completed the special tasks given to them by the Party.” However, as the purge of radicals and the dismantling of the CR's legacy accelerated in the following years, the WPT was vehemently criticized for “creating antagonism between the Party leadership and the working class, and between the working class and intellectuals,” spreading “disturbing teaching and scientific research” and “turning the universities into the base camp for the persecution of intellectuals.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Major WPT leaders were investigated and punished to varying degrees. The demise of the WPTs demonstrates that they were a political tool and their role was entirely determined by how elite politics played out at the top.

In addition, owing to its social misplacement, the worker power in the CR failed to represent and pursue workers’ economic interests. While workers assumed power in multiple social sectors, they had no say in policies involving their own well-being. For instance, in the earlier stages of the rebellion in 1966, some contract and temporary workers, who had long been excluded from permanent urban residency, lifetime employment and various benefits reserved for formal state workers, took the opportunity to seek redress for their grievances. They made radical economic demands, such as a request for Shanghai hukou 户口, more subsidies, higher wages and regular employee status. Their actions were quickly suppressed and condemned as “the evil wind of economism” (jingjizhuyi yaofeng 经济主义妖风).Footnote ⁷⁷ After that, worker rebels never again raised economic demands in connection with their activities. Indeed, the WGHQ's founding declaration contained no economic programme; rather, it declared the overthrow of capitalist-roaders to be its sole mission. Even after the WGHQ officially replaced the Shanghai General Trade Union, under the new name “Workers’ Representative Congress” (gongdaihui 工代会) in 1972, it did little to address workers’ economic grievances in areas such as wages, subsidies, housing and labour policies. Workers in Shanghai had endured an eight-year wage freeze, while the monthly starting salary in factories had been reduced from 48 to 36 yuan. The livelihood of Shanghai's working class had, at best, been stagnant and in many ways had deteriorated during the CR. Former rebel leaders who assumed important government positions made no effort to improve workers’ economic conditions.Footnote ⁷⁸ The WPTs’ mission was unrelated to what workers were concerned with in the workplace. Worker power, in other words, was separated from workers’ interests.

The distorted nature of worker power during the CR can be further understood in the context of China's economic transition. From the 1990s onwards, industrial reform brought massive layoffs of state workers. The working class that had looked so formidable just a decade or so before now stood almost powerless in the face of this attack on its economic interests. More than 20 million workers lost their jobs across the country. In the first five years of industrial restructuring from 1991 to 1996, more than a million workers were laid off in Shanghai, the city that had been the stronghold of “proletarian power” in the Maoist era. Scattered protests against the removal of previous entitlements took place in various factories across Shanghai as well as in other parts of the country. As some studies have shown, workers’ experience in the CR shaped their repertoires of actions, discourse and leadership.Footnote ⁷⁹ Worker resistance sometimes managed to extract concessions from the government; however, such resistance remained cellularized and factory based. The working class as a whole was unable to effectively stand up to policies that eroded its socioeconomic status.Footnote ⁸⁰ Workers’ weakness in this situation stood in stark contrast with their political role during the CR. Their plight amid the industrial reforms suggests a paradox: although Chinese workers had gained extraordinary political experience and enjoyed great power during the CR, they remained incapable of organizing themselves into collective power groups to protect their economic interests.

To conclude, while the WPT movement was an experiment under the Maoist leadership to empower workers which somewhat challenged the Leninist organizational principle, it fell far from embodying the “creativity of proletarian masses” as envisioned by Luxemburg. The political mobilization of the working class during the CR did not after all bring about workers’ “associational power.”Footnote ⁸¹ As China's labour relations have undergone a profound change in the country's transition to a market economy, the party-state has swiftly pre-empted the emergence of worker power in the factory – the very place where such power is necessary for workers to fight for their own interests and rights. The role of the working class remains a conundrum under the Leninist system.