Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

CONCLUSION
his reform team but also the party secretary and the governor of the
county. He Kaiyin then tried to persuade the leadership of three other
counties to implement his reform plan and the party secretaries of the
three counties supported him; but again the plan was aborted in each
of the three counties because of opposition from their People’s
Congresses.
The People’s Congress was traditionally just a rubber stamp in the
past because it was logically meant to be like that. The CCP was
supposed to work for the people and the People’s Congress was
supposed to support the CCP for that reason. The governing logic is
therefore that in a socialist country there should not be major and
principled contradictions between the CCP and the People’s
Congress. However, as the post-Mao reform extended its boundaries,
the CCP started to take the lead in advancing capitalist interests that
can be contradictory to the interest of the ordinary people. Logically,
then, the People’s Congresses are no longer obliged to support the
CCP all the time and they do not, as the defeat of the He proposal
shows. Though development by using capitalist means has been
accepted as a strategy, some of the truth and belief values and beliefs
of socialism still remain. One key truth in this knowledge system is
the public ownership of land in a socialist country. By claiming to
uphold this key truth the People’s Congress claims the right to block
the programme of land privatization, even though the CCP leaders
supported the programme.
In any case, the CCP finds the collective ownership of land in rural
China works well for its march towards capitalism. To start with, the
collective ownership of land gives the CCP some socialist legitimacy
in theory. In practice, collective ownership of land provides a dumping
ground from which an abundant source of cheap migrant labour
for urban manufacturing industry is tapped. And it is cost-free for the
state. In cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, there are few
ghettos that offend one’s sense of decency, as found in many developing
countries. Even though there are an estimated 100 million
migrant workers all over China at any given time, one does not see
children rummaging through rubbish dumps. The key to China’s
success in avoiding ghettos lies the existing land ownership system.
Every rural Chinese migrant worker has a family with some land that
they can resort to for basic survival. When migrant workers are
unable to find work, or grow too old to work in a sweatshop, they
may return to their native villages where a piece of land is nominally
theirs to use. It is for this reason that the migrant workers are able to
leave their children at home in their native villages. What the
People’s Congresses of the three counties wanted to preserve was the
last refuge for the rural poor.
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