Made in China

In the early 1970s, I went to China to study. My subject was meant to be Chinese literature of the twentieth century, but the timing was unfortunate: the Cultural Revolution was still unfolding and Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, had banished or otherwise disposed of the authors and the writing that interested me. Literature had gone to ground and in its place were the collectively produced works—a handful of ‘reformed’ operas and a ballet—on which Jiang Qing decreed that all of China’s future creative efforts were to be modelled. It made for dull evenings in the theatre and desperate days in the classroom, which made me all the more receptive to another proposition in vogue in China at the time: that intellectuals, never a category highly valued by Mao, should drop their books and go and learn from the heroes of the Chinese Revolutionary state—the workers, peasants and soldiers.

Since I was a foreigner, learning from the soldiers was unlikely to be permitted. Workers and peasants were an easier proposition. After a prolonged series of meetings, the authorities at Fudan University in Shanghai agreed that the handful of foreign students then studying there might be permitted to work in suitable factories. I had some idea of what a Chinese factory was like. In Beijing the year before I had spent a tedious week in an electrical components factory winding copper wire around wooden bobbins, ‘repairing’ objects whose function I never understood. And, like anyone who visited China at the time, I had been taken round dozens of factories, visits that invariably began with an inaccurately named ‘brief introduction’. We would sit around long brown varnished tables set out with saucers of sweets and lidded tea mugs—and, if we were lucky, red packets of dry but faintly vanilla-flavoured cigarettes—and hear the standard story of the factory’s evolution from locus of alienated labour and capitalist exploitation to fully mobilized revolutionary production unit in which the people—proletarians in the dictatorship of the proletariat—were both workers and masters. I would note down production figures that had little meaning for me or, as it turned out, for anybody else, before being taken on the obligatory tour of the workshops. The factory had replaced the temple or the palace—all closed if not destroyed—as the officially favoured destination for visitors to China and for years I treasured a postcard that was captioned, with disarming frankness, AMMONIA AND UREA FACTORY, WUHAN.

Visiting a factory was one thing; working in one quite another. It didn’t take long to understand that the arrival of students—especially foreign students—in a factory caused a headache for management: what could we do that would satisfy the political form without inflicting too much damage on production? Different managers solved the problem in different ways. In the depths of the Shanghai winter—a long dank affair unrelieved in those days by any central heating—I was sent to a custard cream factory, selected by the literature department at Fudan because the workers were particularly enthusiastic about Jiang Qing’s model operas and had formed a cultural troupe of their own to sing them. I whiled away my days there in a steady blast of warm air, watching a slow river of hot biscuits emerge from the oven and head for the packers. I was meant to be looking for misshapes but I doubt that anyone took me seriously as quality control. Then, in a Shanghai cotton factory, I worked in the spinning shop. The machines still carried the brass plates that said they were made in Massachusetts. They were jammed close together and when the workshop was running at full tilt the noise was deafening. It looked effortless and satisfying: the threads spun almost too fast to see and the thread pouring on to the bobbins seemed to bulk out by magic. But I soon learned to give the machines I was supposed to be running a wide berth. Any attempt on my part to imitate my supervisor—a patient woman in her thirties whose dexterity had clearly taken some years to acquire—ended in a tangle of broken threads. She would have to stop the ancient machines and re-thread them. It was in this factory that I had an abiding lesson in the role of performance in the daily life of the Chinese Revolution. On our last morning we were told to tidy the workshop for some foreign visitors. That afternoon, as the foreign visitors in question, we were solemnly shown around the same workshops.

I grew attached to the workers assigned to supervise me in my brief industrial career. Unlike the bureaucrats who fretted over our visits, they were refreshingly free of political jargon. Invariably an old worker would be pushed forward to give a dramatic account of the horrors of life before the Revolution, when workers were ground beneath the heel of capitalism, and yet most of the factories I visited or worked in did not appear to have changed much since 1949. The difference lay in official perception. Before ‘liberation’ the workers were the exploited proletariat. After liberation, they were the masters of the state. Their factories might have been as dirty and dangerous as ever, but now, in theory, the workers were the bosses.

Their journey to this theoretical position had not been swift or simple. Mao’s revolutionary movement had an ambivalent attitude to the industrial working class. In the 1920s, under Soviet tutelage, the Chinese tried to follow Marx’s prescription and lead a workers’ revolution. The difficulty was that China barely had a proletariat. China’s workshops had produced textiles and porcelain for thousands of years, but the first modern factory in China had been the Jiangnan Arsenal, set up in Shanghai in 1865 as the decaying Qing dynasty tried, unsuccessfully, to respond to the aggression of a technologically superior West. By the 1920s Shanghai had some modern textile mills, mostly foreign-owned, and there were a few factories in Canton, but the industrial working class was still tiny as a proportion of China’s total population—about 2 million at the beginning of the twentieth century—mainly employed in railways, mining, textiles and shipbuilding. The economy, overall, was in steep decline: according to some economists, between 1820 and 1952, when world economic output rose eightfold, China’s gross domestic product fell from one-third to one-twentieth of total world production, and her income per head shrank from the world average to a quarter of the average.

Stalin, however, believed that the Chinese revolution would be made in alliance with the Guomindang, the Nationalist Party, using the muscle of the urban proletariat. Stalin had cut his political teeth organizing strikes in the oil industry in Baku and shared Marx’s contempt for the peasantry. In China, the Nationalist Party’s early attempts to fulfil his prescription ended in disaster. As early as 1926, Mao had argued that the Chinese revolution should be made not by the urban working class but by a peasant guerrilla army led by the Communist Party. In the 1930s, as the argument persisted inside the Communist Party itself, he wrote of China, ‘a few modern industrial and commercial cities coexist with a vast stagnant countryside; several million industrial workers coexist with several hundred millions of peasants and handicraftsmen labouring under the old system.’ In 1949 the People’s Liberation Army—largely made up of peasants—finally took Beijing.

The peasants’ success did not prevent Mao from repeating most of Stalin’s catastrophic prescriptions for building the perfect society. Stalin sent teams of advisors from the Soviet Union with blueprints for industrial plants and built factories all over the country. After Stalin’s death, China and the USSR fell out and Mao decided to go it alone. By the time I got to China in 1973, China’s industrial output had still not recovered from the Cultural Revolution that had begun in 1964, or from the protracted struggle for power between Mao and his long term opponents in the Party, who had tried to oust him in the early 1960s. Isolated and shorn of formal power, Mao called on China’s young to attack existing authority, including Party authority, to carry the revolution forward. Schools, universities and factories were all thrown into the upheaval. The result was several years of chaos that had, by the time I arrived, settled into a narrow, exhausted ideological orthodoxy. The Red Guards had been sent off to the countryside, the Party had been broken and would be rebuilt from the ground up and the prevailing mood was fear of political transgression.

There were shortages of everything. Basic goods—oil, rice and cotton cloth—were rationed and a bicycle was a scarce luxury for which a citizen might wait for years. Maoism was a popular pose for students all over Western Europe, but after twenty years of Mao’s prescriptions, China’s economy was smaller than Belgium’s and pig bristle loomed large in the table of its major exports.

China was closed, hostile and xenophobic and foreigners were rare enough to cause a minor commotion in the streets. Foreign governments occasionally organized trade fairs and businessmen would set up their stalls and wait for orders. By day, tame and polite crowds of Chinese would turn up: you could, one exhibitor told me, order any number of visitors you wished. By night, so the foreigners complained, other less tame Chinese would arrive and methodically dismantle the equipment piece by piece, trying to capture its secrets. The only foreigners I met who had succeeded in selling anything of note to the world’s largest nation in those years were a stoic Scotsman who had spent months honing his forehand on the British Embassy tennis court while waiting for the Chinese to buy his military aircraft, and a group of mining engineers from Derby who had appeared one day in Beijing. They were intimidatingly tough, with massive forearms and fewer than the usual complement of fingers. They had spent several weeks in a Chinese coal mine in Henan, living off a cache of imported tins of baked beans, installing mining equipment. They did not expect it to last, they told me. The locals, inspired by Mao’s teachings on self-reliance, insisted on making ‘improvements’.

Mao’s version of self-reliance had brought Chinese industrial production almost to a standstill, and yet, according to the state’s official story, the workers were masters of the country. The factory existed not merely to produce things: it was the unit through which the wider community was organized, the means by which the state distributed welfare and the instrument through which unemployment was kept to a minimum. Through it, the Party could reach individuals and their families, to keep them ideologically in line and to mobilize them when necessary for national effort. The factory was both a unit of production and an arm of the state.

Unlike the peasants, factory workers had regular hours and were paid regular wages. They were housed by the factory; when they were ill, the factory clinic attended to them; their children were taken care of in factory crèches and, when the time came, could expect to work in a factory while their parents retired on factory pensions. The factory was both a world of labour and the centre of social and cultural life. It was run by the Party, the workers were told, on behalf of the people. It was a place that many of my Chinese fellow students would gladly have accepted as a lifelong assignment.

And now, thirty years later? I remembered what one worker, Mr Wu, had told me a few months previously, in the autumn of 2004. ‘In China,’ he said, ‘it is a death sentence to be a worker.’ Of course, he was generalizing from the particular: but understandably, the particular being himself.