Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2009
We were worrying over the continuance of workers' pay differentials and wondering how to recognize the time when communism would arrive.
1. Besides my own notes, I have checked through and made use of notes by Jean Doyle and Gordon White concerning sessions we both attended. In addition, I have relied on Christine White's notes concerning details of lower level factory organization, social life and questions pertaining to women.Google Scholar
2. This is the history as presented to us at the time. In looking back over these notes, it becomes striking that our Chinese informants made no mention of the large amounts of industrial equipment said to have been removed by the Soviet Union during her occupation of Shenyang (Mukden) following the Japanese surrender.Google Scholar
3. In discussing the term “class background,” we were reminded that it includes two quantities, family origin (chia-t'ing ch'u-sheng) and personal status (pen-jen ch'eng-fen). That is, a worker who is of petit-bourgeois family origin, but has been a factory worker since youth, may be considered to have a proletarian personal status or standing. The pen-jen ch'eng-fen is particularly applicable to a concept of class-evaluation that stresses political manifestation. It also makes allowance for identifying and struggling with “born proletarians” whose outlooks have become backward or reactionary.Google Scholar
4. This kind of interpretation was first put to me in a conversation with Carl Riskin concerning some thinking he had been doing on the question of material incentives in the Chinese economy.Google Scholar
5. Audrey, Donnithorne cites an interesting reference to this factory during the Great Leap Forward which parallels the Party position set forth above. In part quoting from an article in Electric Motor Industry (Dianji Gongye), No. 10, 25 05 1959Google Scholar, she suggests that, “as a result of such tendencies, [the masses claiming competence to take over technical control against the opposition of the technical staff] technical standards fell sharply in many plants; for example, in the Shenyang Transformer Factory where workers suggested that silicon steel sheets need be dipped in varnish only once, and ‘although it was evident that it would affect the quality of the products, nobody ventured to say it would not do’. Objection, in the atmosphere of 1958, would have been held tantamount to ‘conservatism’.” Audrey Donnithorne, China's Economic System (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), p. 201.Google Scholar Also cited by Barry, Richman in, Industrial Society In Communist China (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 251.Google Scholar