Essay One

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Elizabeth J. Perry and Li Xun. Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution. Boulder: Westview Press, 1997.

Elizabeth Perry and Li Xun’s highly detailed and compact work is a tour-de-force that sets the standard for interpretive studies of urban social movements during China’s Cultural Revolution. Not only does Proletarian Power draw upon an impressive array of fresh sources to illuminate the vicissitudes of worker rebellions and power seizures in Shanghai, it also questions conventional wisdom about the primacy of Red Guards and attempts to provide a theoretical framework for understanding worker-based collective action.

Whereas previous studies of the Cultural Revolution have perhaps overemphasized the leadership role of young, well-educated Red Guards, Perry and Li argue that, at least in Shanghai, rebel worker groups (with Zhang Chunqiao as a well-placed patron and Wang Hongwen as a politically savvy local leader) quickly subsumed the Red Guards and took over the movement, with long-lasting repercussions. This approach highlights the extreme regional variation that characterized Cultural Revolution uprisings and is an important corrective to the slew of scholarly works and memoirs splitting hairs over Red Guard struggles.

Three main groups characterized the worker uprisings in Shanghai: rebels, conservatives, and “economistic” organizations. In constructing their own synthetic analytical framework, Perry and Li draw upon three theoretical approaches to explain the motivations and particularities of each group. The authors posit that a “political networks” analysis, such as that pioneered by Andrew Walder, helps to explain why so many low-level cadres and model workers joined conservative worker organizations at the outset of the Cultural Revolution. Temporary and contract-workers, on the other hand, organized to express grievances during the “wind of economism” – which seems to support Hong Yung Lee’s emphasis on socio-economic background. As for the rebel workers and the highly influential Workers General Headquarters led by Wang Hongwen, Perry and Li turn to cultural approaches and the power of personality, replacing Lucian Pye and Richard Solomon’s psychocultural “tradition of dependence” with the notion that rebel leaders were feisty, ambitious members of a “subculture of opposition” (p. 190). The value of the authors’ integrative analysis is that it depicts the complex diversity of worker responses to the Cultural Revolution and gives credit to the workers for their sophisticated organizational skills. However, they might have been more explicit in delineating what exactly holds together their three chosen theories.

Perry and Li managed to gain access to Cultural Revolution-era factory surveys, background data on almost 2,000 rebel-worker leaders, classified party and government reports, and fascinating Public Security Bureau confessions. They also interviewed key players in the movement. This rich and unique source base, along with detailed and lively biographical anecdotes, lends the book a gripping human dimension. Particularly noteworthy and tragic is the chapter covering the short-lived “winds of economism” of winter 1966-1967, when marginalized workers organized to demand back pay, the right to unionize, and full benefits. This spontaneous proletarian revolution was quickly crushed and denounced as apolitical “economism” by central authorities fearful of setting a precedent by addressing the legitimate grievances of workers. Perry and Li insightfully link this short-lived quest for socio-economic justice to other worker uprisings in China, including those of 1957, 1976, and 1989, but their unfortunate adherence to terms such as “economism” and “apolitical” only serves to futher marginalize the marginalized.

The book is organized thematically, not chronologically. The last chapter, “Institutionalizing Rebel Gains,” suggests that proletarian power persisted in Shanghai throughout the full ten years of the Cultural Revolution decade, particularly within party, governmental, and union organizations. In addition, the chapter represents a positive first step at shedding light on the little-understood 1970s and the complex meanings of the “Criticize Lin Biao-Criticize Confucius” campaign. However, one shortcoming of Proletarian Power’s non-chronological organization is its fuzziness on events and dates. For instance, the Kangping Road Incident (a decisive clash between rebel and conservative worker groups) is mentioned several times before it is finally explained, and the authors waver in dating the event – did it occur in “late 1966” (p. 80) or “early 1967” (p. 73)?

Such flaws cannot besmirch the weighty contribution of Proletarian Power to our understanding of role of workers in the urban Cultural Revolution. One reviewer lauded Perry and Li’s book as an “important and controversial work that forces us to rethink many of our basic assumptions about the Cultural Revolution, Chinese workers, and Chinese politics and society generally” (Marc Blecher, JAS 57.3, Aug. 1998, p. 836).

Jeremy Brown