by Cook, James A. ,Goldstein, Joshua,Johnson, Matthew D. ,Schmalzer, Sigrid
36. See Dalian gongye zhanlanhui, ed., Gongye Zhongguo de chuxing (The embryonic state of industrial China) (Guangzhou: Xinhua shudian, 1950), and Gong zhan hua bao (Industrial exhibit pictorial), no.1 and no.2 (July and September 1949).
37. Dalian gongye zhanlanhui, ed., Gongye Zhongguo de chuxing (The embryonic state of industrial China) (Guangzhou: Xinhua shudian, 1950), 9.
38. DFW, 12.
39. Yan Jing, ed., Dongbei fangwenlu (Records of a journey to the Northeast) (Beijing: Shenghe, dushu and xinzhi sanlian shudian, 1950), 120.
40. Yang Jing, ed. Dongbei fangwen lu (Records of a visit to the Northeast) (Beijing: Shenghuo shudian, 1950), 117–120.
41. Li Zongying, Liu Shiwei, and Liao Bingxion (ed.), Dongbei xing (Travels through the Northeast), 46.
Chapter 11
Spatial Profiling
Seeing Rural and Urban in Mao’s China
Jeremy Brown
People in all societies judge, categorize, and differentiate. During China’s socialist period (1949–1978), one of the main sites of differentiation and discrimination was place-based: urban versus rural. Like racial, ethnic, and gender difference in North America today, rural-urban difference in Mao Zedong’s China was socially constructed and historically contingent. But it was also very real. The way people saw and experienced rural-urban difference had real consequences. Under Mao, people who lived in villages ate different food, spoke a different language, wore different clothes, and had a different skin color from people who lived in cities. A peasant’s typical day was different from that of an urban worker. The economic gap was also huge: urban people earned guaranteed salaries and had money to spend while village incomes were miniscule and tenuous.
When we consider that the Communist revolution was based on peasant support and aimed to bridge the economic and cultural chasm separating city from village, it seems puzzling that difference between urban and rural people remained so persistent during the Mao era. According to orthodox Marxism, the countryside was backward and stagnant, and only the urban working class could effect revolutionary change. China under Mao, however, appeared to point toward a new path, with peasants as the main revolutionary force offering the utopian promise of equality between city and countryside. But reality was more complex. After the Communists established the People’s Republic in 1949, China entered a period of “learning from the Soviet Union” and Soviet-style heavy industrial development became priority number one.1 In order to finance urban industrialization, peasants were forced to sell grain to the state at artificially low prices and were restricted from leaving their villages. At times, Mao expressed dismay at the anti-rural implications of this policy orientation. As historian Maurice Meisner writes, Mao responded by promoting the “resurgence of an ideology that spoke on the peasants’ behalf and the pursuit of policies that tended to benefit the countryside rather than the cities and their ‘urban overlords.’”2 This ideology was most evident during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1960), which called for irrigation projects, rural electrification, and small-scale village industry, and again during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when more rural youths attended school than at any other point in Chinese history.
Yet while the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were ambitious and ultimately cataclysmic experiments, neither event significantly changed how rural and urban people saw each other. Why not? One significant factor was the two-tiered household registration, or hukou, system, which classified every individual in China according to rural or urban residence.3 Household registration was institutionalized after the starvations and massive population dislocations of the Great Leap famine (when tens of millions perished), and it guaranteed food rations, housing, health care, and education to urban residents. Rural people were expected to be self-reliant and were officially restricted from moving to cities, although many peasants still migrated illicitly.4 Mao may have periodically questioned the anti-rural nature of China’s Stalinist development model, but because he never wavered from its institutional underpinnings (the hukou system and grain rationing), rural and urban people remained unequal.
While scholars have documented the details and consequences of the hukou system, the visual dimension of rural-urban difference is less well understood. Rural-urban difference endured under Mao because of an ingrained culture of seeing that predated the Communist takeover of the mainland. I call this culture of seeing “spatial profiling,” which means determining someone’s background as rural or urban at first glance and treating him or her differently based on appearance. When we analyze place-based identity in China in terms of how people saw one another, everyday exchanges and local practices seem more powerful and lasting than Maoist ideology or shifting national policy.
How old was spatial profiling in China? Historians differ on the extent of the rural-urban divide in Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasty (1644–1911) China. Some scholars hold that there were no significant cultural differences between the two realms, while others argue that a distinct urban identity emerged.5 Most agree that by the Republican era (1912–1949), the gap between town and country had sharpened significantly as the rural economy stagnated and as urban centers—particularly coastal treaty ports like Shanghai and Tianjin—witnessed an upsurge of modern industry and print culture.6
As modernization fueled the growth of cosmopolitan cities, urban dwellers increasingly came to view villagers and rural life as inferior. Historian Xiaorong Han has shown how during the first half of the twentieth century, urban intellectuals, even those who had been born and raised in villages themselves, saw peasants in contradictory and contemptuous ways: for example, ignorant yet sweetly innocent, or poor yet disturbingly rebellious. As Han writes, this engendered a process of mutual alienation: “No matter how strongly the intellectuals sympathized with the peasants, in the eyes of the peasants they were often strangers with strange ideas as well as members of the ruling class.”7 By the time the Communists assumed national leadership in 1949, rural and urban people spoke different languages, wore different clothes, and had distinct conceptions of work and labor. Migrants brought customs and rituals from their native places to the metropolis. And throughout the Mao era urban people were sent to live in the countryside for “reeducation” by the peasants and to provide expertise needed for building the socialist countryside—including millions of “sent-down youth” during the Cultural Revolution (see Zheng’s chapter in this volume). Nonetheless, cities and villages continued to diverge in architecture, infrastructure, and social geography.8
Communist policymakers and propagandists were well aware that villagers and city dwellers held potentially troublesome preconceived notions about each other. But official efforts to reshape urbanites’ views about peasants, both in the immediate post-takeover period and throughout the 1960s and 1970s, ended up reinforcing difference rather than eliminating it. Spatial profiling—seeing others as rural or urban in everyday interactions—proved to be remarkably durable.
In 2004–2005, over the course of a year of research in and around Tianjin, I asked almost everyone I met about rural-urban difference, logging ninety interviews. When I was in Tianjin, north China’s largest port city and home to more than ten million residents, I asked if people had ever been to a village during the Mao years, and what they thought of peasants and villages. When I went to the countryside, mostly to Baodi County, a rural area about forty-five miles north of Tianjin, I asked the opposite.9 Whether in the city or in villages, I asked how people could determine the rural or urban identity of someone they were meeting for the first time.
The people I interviewed assumed that, as a foreigner, I knew little about China and the Mao period. My perceived ignorance was an advantage because respondents were forced to explain in detail things that they usually took for granted. Differences in clothing, food, and language might be too obvious and natural to mention to an insider. But these everyday distinctions get us closer to understanding how people have seen and experienced rural-urban difference
.
Seeing People
As economic networks between city and countryside were reestablished in the early 1950s after years of war and strife, propaganda images clarified that cities would remain China’s locus of civilization and economic development. In Figure 11.1, a cartoon celebrating renewed rural-urban ties, shopping in the city is presented as a happy event for peasants, but in order to mark the shoppers as rural, they are drawn as yokels, with wrinkled faces, big hats, and baggy, rumpled clothes. One is clutching a long pipe, the other toting a gunny sack. They have plenty of time on their hands as they happily pose while indifferent townspeople go about their regular business in the background. The cartoonist was playing up to readers’ imagined notions of what rural people should look like. Worn clothing and wrinkled faces remained surefire markers of rural people well after 1950.
Figure 11.1 This cartoon comes from a travel montage featuring the Communists’ efforts to rebuild the city of Yantai in Shandong province in 1950. The cartoonist’s message was that peasant shoppers belonged in a healthy socialist city, but they were nonetheless clearly identified as wide-eyed, bumpkin-like outsiders. From: Shang Yi, “Nongminmen xiao mimi de jincheng lai mai dongxi” [Peasants smilingly enter the city to buy things], Manhua yuekan 6 (November 1, 1950): 20.
Figure 11.1 suggests that peasants would still be easily identifiable as hicks in Mao’s new China. Almost all of my respondents claimed that they were able to tell whether someone was rural or urban during the Mao period without hearing them speak a word. Even in a first encounter on the street or at the market, clothing, bearing, and skin color were clear indications of place-based identity and helped people mentally categorize others. One Tianjin man visited his ancestral village for the first time as a young boy in the 1970s. He said that the main difference he noticed between city people and peasants was that peasants “looked old” because they worked outside all day long.10
Other city people said that they could tell a person was rural because of his or her darker skin. City people who spent a lot of time outside felt stigmatized as rural by their urban peers. A Tianjin-born teenager who was sent to work at a state-run farm on the outskirts of the city in 1963 was annoyed by the constant comments of his family during his weekend visits home: “you’re tanned black,” they kept saying.11 In Figure 11.2, a photograph taken in 1968, compare the face of model sent-down youth Xing Yanzi (right) with the face of her conversation partner (left). The elderly woman’s dark, wrinkled face identifies her as a peasant. Even in images meant to celebrate rural-urban togetherness, the city was represented by youthful vigor and light, while the countryside appeared dark and old by comparison.
Clothing was another important marker of rural difference. Respondents described urban clothing in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s as fashionable, new, and made from tailored fabrics. Village attire was dirty, tattered, and made of homespun cotton. Even in images meant to publicize the interconnectedness of cities and villages in 1950s China, dress and adornment identified people as urban or rural. Figure 11.3 accompanies a written passage about how cotton and food from villages enter the city and help factory production to flourish. On the left, a woman with short hair, a floral-print top, and a work apron attends to a machine in a textile factory. On the right, a woman with braids and a plain, striped top picks cotton by hand. The factory worker’s modern hairstyle and showy clothes mark her as urban.
City and village people looked different before the Communists assumed power, and this would continue in the new society, as Figure 11.3 suggests. Tianjin residents noticed differences in clothing as soon as the mostly rural soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army occupied the city in January 1949. A Communist official who followed the soldiers into Tianjin remembered that city people were surprised by the conquerors’ rustic attire and asked, “How can you wear such tattered clothing?” The new rulers of Tianjin explained, “We wear these clothes all day long to march and fight battles, so of course they are tattered. We aren’t particular about such things.”12
Figure 11.2 Li Changjie, “Jiaoliu xuexi xinde” [Study notes on an exchange], Renmin huabao she. July 1968. In this photograph by a photographer working for China Pictorial (Renmin huabao), a model sent-down youth, Xing Yanzi, speaks with an unidentified woman, whose red ribbon reads “daibiao” (representative). Available from: ChinaFotoBank, photo 301644, http://photos.cipg.org.cn/.
Tianjin residents also worried that the new regime might prohibit urban fashions. Indeed, as Christian Hess’s contribution to this volume shows, transforming urban environments to render them more visibly revolutionary was a key priority for Communist leaders. People in Tianjin spread rumors that the Communists had prohibited urban-style gowns and leather shoes, and some clerks stopped wearing glasses to the office because spectacles were a clear marker of an urban intellectual identity.13 This particular symbol persisted throughout the Mao era, as shown in Figure 11.4, a photograph taken in 1975 of city youth collaborating with peasants on scientific soil management. Even without reading a caption, viewers would be able to immediately identify glasses-wearing Hou Jun, front left, as a woman from the city sharing her specialized knowledge with rural people.
Figure 11.3 This visual depiction of urban-rural difference appears in a book of verse celebrating China’s “worker-peasant alliance” (gongnong lianmeng). From: Xiu Mengqian, Gongnong lianmeng xiang qian jin [The worker-peasant alliance advances forward] (Shanghai: Laodong chubanshe, 1953), 18.
Shortly after the Communists occupied Tianjin, female workers asked the Party cadres taking over their factories if they were still allowed to perm their hair or wear lipstick and high heels.14 The officials replied that people were free to wear whatever they wanted, but the regime was much stricter toward its own officials than toward urban factory workers. In 1949, a woman cadre at the newly founded Tianjin Daily newspaper found an old pair of high heels on a windowsill at the office. In the rural areas under Communist control before 1949, she had loved to dance and always wanted to wear heels, so she was elated to find a free pair. She began wearing the shoes, which had probably been discarded by a more cautious coworker, but her colleagues criticized her for violating the image of frugality that the Communists wanted to present. She had to get rid of the shoes and do a self-criticism.15 In policing what the woman newspaper cadre could wear, the new regime was acknowledging urban-rural difference. High heels were an extreme symbol of urban leisure and frivolity, and because the party was striving to uphold its hardworking image in the immediate takeover period, it was a serious ideological lapse for the dance-loving woman to wear them.
The concern over ideological correctness gained renewed emphasis in the mid-1960s, when in the wake of the Great Leap disaster, Mao became concerned that the revolution was dying. In the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution, the Party launched the Socialist Education Movement and Four Cleanups Movement to root out corruption and reinstill commitment to socialist revolution. And so, more than fifteen years after the high heels flap, official documents again criticized urban clothing styles as unacceptably decadent, and in so doing, implicitly recognized the continued salience of difference between city and village styles.
Figure 11.4 Gao Mingyi, “Hou Jun he qunzhong tantao tianjian guanli” [Hou Jun explores field management with the masses], Renmin huabao she. 1975. In this photograph by a photographer working for China Pictorial, model sent-down youth Hou Jun (front left), works in the fields with the nameless “masses” of Doujia village. Available from: ChinaFotoBank, photo 284385, http://photos.cipg.org.cn/.
A 1966 article, “The Revolutionary Crucible Gives Birth to a New Person,” chronicled the multiple transformations of a girl named Jinxia, who left her village in Hebei Province to attend a university in Tianjin. When she first got to Tianjin, Jinxia wore rural clothes and her classmates derided her as a hick. She decided that it was a loss of face for her to wear her coarse cloth gown in the city, so she borrowed money and had a fashionable skirt and blouse made. She also
traded her old cloth bookbag for a faux leather handbag. During summer break, Jinxia visited her home village. Jinxia’s mother had died shortly after childbirth, and a fellow villager had nursed her. As soon as she got off the bus, Jinxia ran into her old wet nurse, who cried out a happy greeting, but Jinxia pretended not to hear her. A friend with Jinxia said, “Somebody is calling you.” Jinxia looked back, saw the old woman’s dirty tattered clothing, and coldly replied, “I don’t know her.” Later when she was sent to another Hebei village on a work assignment, Jinxia realized her errors and apologized for “forgetting her roots.” Her story confirms that clothing was still a crucial marker of rural-urban difference in 1966.16
According to my interviewees, even new city clothes were not enough to cover up someone’s rural identity. Four people, all village-born, said that rural people carried themselves differently, no matter what they wore. A Baodi woman who first went to the city in the late 1950s said that “even if a village person has good clothes,” he or she “cannot wear it well, it will not look clean.”17 Another Baodi man who spent many years in and around Tianjin agreed, saying, “Even if a peasant puts on city clothes and goes to the city, you can tell that he’s a peasant from his bearing.”18 A rural bearing (fengdu) was hesitant and dazed, he explained, not confident and spirited like that of urban people. As this man’s comments and Jinxia’s experience as a new college student attest, when villagers went to the city or came in contact with urban people, they became acutely aware of their inferior status. For the first time, their clothes seemed dirty and threadbare. One villager who first went to Tianjin in 1949 seeking work remembered: “I felt I was an idiot and that I knew nothing.”19
In addition to outward markers of urbanity or rusticity, most of the people I interviewed were convinced that villagers and city people had distinct personalities. City residents often called villagers laoshi or pushi, terms that mean “honest” or “down-to-earth” but also imply “naive and simpleminded.” Communist propaganda actually encouraged such descriptions of rural personality shortly after the takeover of Tianjin. For example, a 1949 report about an industrial exhibition in Tianjin remarked that the presence of peasants at the meeting had transformed city residents’ “incorrect viewpoint of treating peasants as unimportant.” By meeting villagers, city people learned about “the peasants’ hard work, plain living, and sincere and frank feelings.”20 The report emphasized post-1949 changes, but still assumed difference and hierarchy.
