by Cook, James A. ,Goldstein, Joshua,Johnson, Matthew D. ,Schmalzer, Sigrid
Rural people I talked to readily agreed that they were laoshi,21 and had an even broader vocabulary to describe themselves as honest or straightforward: shizai, tanbai (real, honest, dependable), chengshi (honest and trustworthy), and hanhou (simple and honest). But villagers also had negative impressions of urban personalities. If rural people were honest and straightforward, then urbanites were the opposite: jian (treacherous), jianhua (crafty), or hua (slippery).
These place-based descriptions were not limited to everyday conversations. They also appeared in official documents throughout the Mao era. A 1951 report on a trade exhibition in Tianjin noted that peasants, afraid of city thieves and cheats, held on tight to their wallets after getting off the train in Tianjin. Before the 1951 meeting, some Tianjin people still thought that “peasants were tattered, casual, and impolite.” But after meeting rural people at the trade exhibition, Tianjin residents supposedly realized that peasants were actually “honest and considerate, plain and simple, well-behaved and courteous.”22 Yet these apparent ideological transformations were fleeting. In advance of a peasant representative meeting in Tianjin in 1965, urban shopkeepers admitted that they judged rural people solely by their appearance (yi yimao qu ren) and tried to pawn off their dull, low-quality items on gullible rural shoppers. After hearing propaganda about the peasant representative meeting, the shopkeepers pledged to change their ways and treat peasants better.23
Why were such stereotypes so persistent throughout the Mao era? Ideas about rural-urban difference predated the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Afterward they were either impervious to propaganda or buttressed by official messages that implicitly reinforced difference even as they outwardly criticized discrimination and ostentation. Alongside new institutional barriers like the hukou system that separated city and countryside, a longstanding culture of seeing differentiated between rural and urban people, both in everyday interactions and in official propaganda.
Seeing Place
Ideas about difference went beyond appearances and purportedly innate characteristics. People linked distinct notions of food, labor, and cleanliness to the urban sphere or the rural sphere. All of these issues arose from economic differences between privileged cities and struggling villages.
How food was obtained and prepared—and, not insignificantly, how it tasted—loomed large in respondents’ ideas about rural-urban difference in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. For many in the Tianjin region, the difference between village and city came down to coarse grain (culiang) versus fine grain (xiliang), meaning cheap cornmeal versus expensive processed wheat flour. Villagers wanted to make sure I understood that although noodles and dumplings made out of wheat flour are relatively common in northern Chinese villages nowadays, they were rare luxuries forty years ago. My hosts in villages made a point of feeding me fried cornmeal cakes or steamed corn buns so that I could get a taste of what rural life was like during the Mao period.
One elderly Baodi woman gave me a plate of watermelon slices and told me that she had never been to a city in her life. Tianjin was just over an hour away by bus, and Beijing was only two hours to the west, but she had never had the chance to visit. She had heard that the city was great, especially compared to her village, with its bumpy dirt roads. In 2005, the uneven potholed lanes remained, but as she understood it, the rural-urban gap had closed in terms of food. “We used to eat corn buns here,” she said, and that was all she needed to say about rural-urban difference in the Mao era.24 To her, eating coarse grain was the main thing that distinguished her village from Tianjin—before and after 1949.
Rural women who had the chance to visit Tianjin in the late 1960s and early 1970s remembered the wheat noodles and dumplings more than anything else. One Baodi teenager made friends with a Tianjin girl who had been sent to live in her village in the late-1960s. The sent-down youth’s parents heard about their daughter’s new friend and invited her to visit Tianjin. “When we got to Tianjin, I thought that everything was new and fresh,” the country girl said. “Her family treated me very well, they boiled noodles and made dumplings for me. Where could you find wheat flour in the village back then?”25 She went on to praise the beauty of Tianjin’s colonial buildings, relics of the city’s days as a treaty port, but the architecture was secondary to her memories of special food.
The corn/wheat gap was one of the most glaring manifestations of rural inferiority. Rural people knew that urbanites ate wheat regularly, and city residents were aware of the difference too. I spoke with an eighty-year-old Tianjin-born man who asserted, “The food that peasants make tastes bad.” Switching into English, he added: “No taste, no odor; tasteless, odorless.” He remembered that in the 1940s and 1950s, food-based distinctions were used to curse people. “You cannot afford to eat wheat flour” and “corn brain” were two of the most stinging insults of the era, he said. In everyday interactions, such anti-rural slurs were as prevalent after 1949 as they were before.
While rural people acknowledged the high quality of city food, they disparaged the quantity. Rural visitors to Tianjin in the 1950s complained that portions were too small. They felt that this stinginess reflected poorly on city people. Offering small portions was not laoshi. One old man I met in the Baodi town square said that whenever he went to the city for family visits or for work meetings, he did not like to eat out or in city people’s homes because the dishes were too small and everything seemed too formal. At restaurants, he paid what seemed like a lot of money but never got enough to eat. He preferred going to a relative’s house in the city for home-style meals.
Rural men complained about tiny platters of food in Tianjin, but women envied the conveniences of city cooking. When a village teenager visited her sister’s city home in the late 1970s, she immediately noticed that meals were prepared on a gas stove. It seemed so easy and fast. In villages outside of Tianjin, families heated their food over fires fed by dried corn stalks and other kindling, a practice that has continued in the twenty-first century today, as seen in Figure 11.5 (see website). While the concrete base shown in the photograph is a relatively recent innovation, the use of organic fuel is not.
For rural people in the 1960s and 1970s, cooking on a gas stove was an unattainable luxury. That city people cooked with gas instead of burning dried corn stalks also exemplified how divorced they had become from agricultural production. Both villagers and city people agreed that urbanites did not understand where their food came from. One running joke that three people independently mentioned to me was the inability of urban youth to distinguish between chives and young wheat stalks. When one Tianjin youngster first arrived in a Baodi village as a sent-down youth in April 1964, he assumed that the surrounding fields of green sprouts swaying in the breeze were full of the tasty chives that he enjoyed in his dumplings back at home. He wondered aloud why there were so many chives growing there. A villager on the welcoming committee cleared up the confusion. “After [the sprouts] grow up, we harvest and process them into the wheat that you eat in the city,” the villager explained.26
Another Tianjin boy assigned to a village even closer to the city made the same mistake in 1977. “You sure have a lot of chives,” he told the villagers who greeted him. Probably tired of correcting confused city kids, the peasants stayed quiet. A few days later, the group of newly arrived sent-down youth used wheat sprouts as filling for a batch of what were supposed to be chive dumplings. They tasted terrible.27
The issue of where food came from was connected to another major place-based distinction: city work versus rural labor. Villagers toiled in the fields from dusk until dawn and made hardly any money, while salaried urban employees had set work hours and a day off on the weekend. There are two different words for “work” in Chinese: one refers to employment with regular hours (gongzuo), the other to farm work and other non-salaried physical labor (ganhuor). Peasants doing farm work do not gongzuo, they ganhuor. The main difference was that city workers had guaranteed salaries, while village incomes depende
d on the harvest and how much grain the state requisitioned in a given year.
Not only was farm work virtually unpaid, but it involved incredibly tough physical labor. City people who tried their hands at farm work invariably described the experience as arduous, while rural dwellers derided the inability of urbanites to work hard. One Baodi villager had the opportunity to compare rural and urban people after he joined the army in 1968. His unit was stationed in coastal Fujian Province and included recruits from cities and villages throughout China. He noticed immediately that the city soldiers had trouble with physical labor. The city people lacked toughness, he said. The Baodi soldier explained that indoor and outdoor plants grow differently, meaning that the city soldiers were like delicate house plants.28
Sent-down youth or visiting urban officials openly admitted that they were not as good at farm work as the locals. This seemed natural to them, but they found it troubling that villagers judged visitors based on their ability to toil in the fields. A Tianjin teen sent to Baodi in 1964 said that he was unhappy during his first two years in the village because he was so much slower and weaker than his rural peers. Nobody appreciated his middle school education. All they saw was how poorly he did farm work. He earned less than half of the upper limit of daily work points, less than an average local woman made. The teenager was adept at repairing machines, better than local villagers but even when he did repairs, he still made fewer work points. The standard for assigning work points was field labor, not repair work, he was told.29
Officials stationed in villages made a point of trying to work hard in the fields. One Tianjin cadre was sent to a Baodi village in 1975 to mediate a dispute. In order to gain the trust of people in the village, his first task was to do farm work. “When a peasant is checking out what an official is really like,” he said, “he checks how you labor, if you shirk work or if you are lazy. Whoever works with him and leads the way on a job gets along best.” The official worked hard and reached the level of the strongest female farm worker. This was enough to earn the respect of the locals, he said.30
While some urbanites at least attempted to work in the fields, others openly scorned agricultural labor as dirty, unpaid grunt work. City children adopted this attitude at a young age. One man born in a Hebei village in 1962 moved to Tianjin as a small child along with his parents and three siblings. His father had a factory job, but his mother and the children lived in Tianjin illegally, without urban hukou. (In the Mao era, children inherited hukou status from their mother. This rule limited urban population growth in an era when many families lived apart, with migrant men working city jobs while their wives and children remained rural residents.) The Hebei man said that as a child, he was teased because he was from a village. One day, in a fight with an older neighborhood bully, the village boy managed to beat up his tormentor. The humiliated loser told his rural-born nemesis, “When we grow up you will have to hoe the dirt in a village and I will become a factory worker.”31 Even children knew that village labor was inferior to city work.
This association between dirt, filth, and villages remained strong throughout the Mao period. One man from a mountain village was convinced that city people looked down on peasants because “villagers have bad hygiene, they smell bad.” For this reason, he said, it was “natural” that outsiders would scorn peasants. Rural people who went to the city felt self-conscious about their dirtiness. They associated hygiene with urbanity, and saw dirtiness as a sign of inadequacy. Two Baodi women who visited Tianjin remarked that the city seemed exceptionally clean and that everyone emphasized hygiene there. They felt that constant remarks about hygiene might be targeted at them. One woman who was in Tianjin in the early 1960s told people in the city, “Don’t dislike us because we are dirty. If it were not for us, what would you eat?” She explained in an interview, “Actually they did not look down on me. Because I was young at the time, my clothes were clean and quite nice. They all said that I did not seem like a village person.”32 She was cleaner than the city residents had expected, she said.
Spatial Profiling
Spatial profiling in Mao’s China marked individuals as rural or urban. People saw others’ clothing and skin color, and coded them as belonging to the countryside or the city. The same place-based encoding applied to everyday practices, from cooking and eating to labor and hygiene. This everyday culture of seeing was so ingrained that policy and propaganda during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, far from eliminating rural-urban difference, actually reinforced it.
Spatial profiling in Mao’s China occurred in both official settings and in nonofficial interactions at the grassroots. Everyday place-based profiling stigmatized rural people and led villagers to internalize a sense of inferiority vis-à-vis city people. This sense of inferiority was bolstered by backhanded praise in official propaganda (peasants as “honest and simple”) and also by the socialist planned economy, which offered a package of exclusive rights and benefits to urban residents and attempted to lock villagers to rural communes. Yet while the hukou system was an important part of the rural-urban divide, it did not make all of the difference. An entrenched way of seeing that stemmed from genuine economic and cultural differences greeted the mostly rural Communist soldiers and cadres who took over Chinese cities in 1949. As long as the economic and cultural gap between cities and villages remained, so would spatial profiling.
notes
1. Research for this chapter was assisted by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award and a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For a concise overview of the planned economy under Mao, see Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 55–84.
2. Maurice J. Meisner, Marxism, Maoism, and Utopianism: Eight Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 71.
3. Tiejun Cheng and Mark Selden, “The Origins and Consequences of China’s Hukou System,” China Quarterly 139 (September 1994): 644–668.
4. On the substantial unsanctioned migration of the Mao period, see Diana Lary, “Hidden Migrations: Movements of Shandong People, 1949–1978,” Chinese Environment and Development 7, no. 1–2 (1996): 56–72.
5. On the idea of a rural-urban continuum during the Ming, see F. W. Mote, “The Transformation of Nanking, 1350–1400,” in G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), 101–154; on the formation of a distinct urban identity in the Qing dynasty, see William T. Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796–1889 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984).
6. See, for example, David Faure and Tao Tao Liu, “Introduction,” in David Faure and Tao Tao Liu, eds., Town and Country in China: Identity and Perception (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 1–16.
7. Xiaorong Han, Chinese Discourses on the Peasant, 1900–1949 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 139.
8. See Hanchao Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
9. Baodi County became a sub-municipal administrative district (qu) administered by Tianjin in 2001.
10. Interviewee 33 (author’s numbering system).
11. Interviewee 57.
12. Zhonggong Tianjin shiwei dangshi ziliao zhengji weiyuanhui and Tianjin shi dang’anguan, eds., Tianjin jieguan shi lu [History of the takeover of Tianjin, hereafter cited as TJJG], vol. 2 (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1994), 259.
13. TJJG, vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1991), 136; TJJG, vol. 2, 153, 183.
14. TJJG, vol. 2, 183.
15. TJJG, vol. 2, 352.
16. Hebei siqing tongxun [Hebei four cleanups bulletin], zengkan 61 (May 23, 1966): 29–31.
17. Interviewee 86.
18. Interviewee 18.
19. Interviewee 43.
20. Tianjin shi dang’anguan, ed., Jiefang chuqi Tianjin chengshi ji
ngji hongguan guanli [Tianjin urban macroeconomic management in the initial stage following liberation] (Tianjin: Tianjin shi dang’an chubanshe, 1995), 326.
21. When journalist Peter Hessler befriended a rural family in the early 2000s, laoshi was the only word the parents used to praise their young son. Peter Hessler, “Kindergarten,” New Yorker 80, no. 7 (April 5, 2004): 58–67.
22. Wang Kangzhi jinian wenji bianjizu, ed., Wang Kangzhi jinian wenji [Collected writings commemorating Wang Kangzhi] (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 2001), 434.
23. Hexi District Archives (Tianjin), 1-6-26C, 9.
24. Interviewee 65.
25. Interviewee 88.
26. Interviewee 26.
27. Interviewee 64.
28. Interviewee 22.
29. Interviewee 6.
30. Interviewee 5.
31. Interviewee 31.
32. Interviewee 86.
Chapter 12
Cinema and Propaganda during the Great Leap Forward
Matthew D. Johnson
What is propaganda? While the term connotes a pejorative meaning today, during the early twentieth century it served mainly to denote a type of persuasion—images and words which imparted a political message. The rise of modern propaganda is closely associated with the rise of new technologies such as radio, film, and television which were viewed not only as sources of entertainment but also as potential tools of social education and control. Over the decades however, the term “propaganda” has become mainly associated in the U.S. with “totalitarian regimes and war efforts, [which were] perceived as threats to liberal democracies.”1 Our negative usage of the word “propaganda,” in other words, has a history. In China as well, terms like propaganda and political education may today raise a certain degree of skepticism among the general populace. Yet it is undeniable that throughout much of the twentieth century the production of mass media for specific state purposes constituted a highly public and officially acknowledged function of government. By asking a few simple questions: This chapter will dispel some of the mystery or unfamiliarity associated with cultural life in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) during the “Mao years.” What was propaganda from the perspective of those who produced it? What messages did it contain? How was it disseminated to audiences? How was it viewed and received? Finally, how did it become a part of its recipients’ everyday lives? The medium and era upon which we will focus is film during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961)—not only because propaganda images from this period were so vivid, as we shall see, but also because this was a key era when film’s influence, particularly its spread into the countryside, grew enormously. The Leap thus provides scholars of visual culture with pivotal moment for examining how state claims which now strike us as exaggerated, even hollow, were made “real” for audiences, and how they might have been received.
