The Dilemma of Thought Reform

Abstract

This article explores the efforts of the early People’s Republic of China (PRC) to intern and reform beggars, prostitutes, and other socially marginalized individuals as important precursors to the post-1957 system of Reeducation through Labor. It links a case study of local practice in Beijing to central government discussions about policy formulation to trace a series of co-constituted changes in the practical methods associated with thought reform as well as in the way PRC reeducators perceived the nature of their targets. It argues that Reeducation through Labor, as moniker and practice, was forged through the many contradictions between real idealism and practical reality that were discussed, debated, but never entirely resolved by the earliest PRC reeducators.

Keywords

reeducation beggars prostitutes Chinese Communist Party

For many scholars and pundits, the Chinese word “reeducation” (jiaoyang) is largely synonymous with forced labor. Studies of China’s administrative penalty, Reeducation through Labor (laodong jiaoyang), tend to emphasize the links between reeducation, the correctional system in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the suppression of dissent. Many analysts view the continuing use of the word “reeducation” as a misleading remnant of Mao-era hyperbole and/or as evidence of contemporary political whitewashing (Yardley, 2005; Williams and Wu, 2004; Wu, 1992). Reports from former prisoners certainly suggest that claims made by reeducation’s defenders are overstated at best, but some scholars have attempted to account for that reality while simultaneously taking seriously the continuing importance to reeducators of the rehabilitative ideology (Fu, 2005a, 2005b; Seymour and Anderson, 1998; Dutton, 1992). The present article continues in this vein, adding that to dismiss “reeducation” as meaningless relic or propagandistic falsehood is to elide the fundamental and historically significant tensions reflected in the continued use of the term. I turn to new, relatively untapped sources to argue that Reeducation through Labor, as moniker and practice, arose from the many contradictions between idealism and reality that were discussed, debated, but never entirely resolved by the earliest PRC reeducators.

In August 1957 the “Decision of the State Council Regarding the Question of Reeducation through Labor” established the system that is still in place today. In 2012, the Beijing Bureau of Reeducation through Labor describes incarceration in its units as “administrative detention,” and reeducation centers across the PRC house detainees accused of behaviors said to fall “between crime and error” (Beijing shi laodong, 2012; Bakken, 2005: 12). Local authorities may institutionalize individuals without trial, and although internees can contest their detention, the appeal is also at the discretion of the police and the reeducation administration (Beijing shi laodong, 2012). In the ongoing effort to understand the origins of this ambiguous sanction, most studies have looked to the precursory practices targeting counterrevolutionaries and have focused on Reeducation-through-Labor’s political targets, especially dissidents (Fu, 2005b; Williams and Wu, 2004; Seymour and Anderson, 1998; Wu, 1992). While it is true that Reeducation through Labor cannot be understood apart from its links to counterrevolutionaries and so-called “political offenders,” the policy also has other origins.

When policy makers formulated the 1957 legislation that still governs Reeducation through Labor today, they drew heavily not just on their work with counterrevolutionaries, but also on their experiences with the many “social parasites” interned in the early 1950s. Many have noted in passing, as Fu Hualing did in 2005, that the 1957 Decision represented the fusion of what had previously been two separate projects, the suppression of counterrevolutionaries and the eradication of urban “social problems” (Fu, 2005b: 814–15). As early as 1968, Jerome Cohen linked Reeducation through Labor to “similar measures to meet the serious threat to public order that was posed by the prevalence of prostitutes, petty thieves, black marketeers, opium addicts, vagrants, and other social parasites” (Cohen, 1968: 239). Other scholars have made similar claims, noting, as Seymour and Anderson did, “the roots of [reeducation] can be traced to the early 1950s (when the institutions went by such names as ‘new life schools’ and ‘loafers camps’)” (Seymour and Anderson, 1998: 19). Williams and Wu concurred, “Early reform schools for prostitutes provided initial models for the kind of protracted but legally informal detention that has long characterized” Reeducation through Labor (Williams and Wu, 2004: 56; see also Whyte, 1973: 253). Indeed, since the institution of Reeducation through Labor in 1957, more than half of the individuals interned in reeducation centers have been classified not as “political offenders,” like dissidents, but as “ordinary offenders,” which include people accused of prostitution, petty theft, gambling, and recidivist begging (Fu, 2005b; Difang zhi, 1999b).

Yet no works in English have explored these historical connections in detail, and Chinese studies have been cursory as well. In 2010 Huang and Wang argued that “there was an inseparable connection” and a “cause-and-effect relationship” between Reeducation through Labor and the internment of beggars, prostitutes, and petty thieves in the early 1950s (Huang and Wang, 2010: 79). They further asserted that the contemporary use of the term “reeducation” reflects the earliest mission of PRC internment, but their 2010 article did not examine that relationship closely, offering, instead, a relatively long-term look at the history of social relief in modern China (73). Importantly, there are a number of excellent studies, in both Chinese and English, that delve into the early-PRC attempts to intern so-called “social parasites,” but such works tend to limit their scope to the first two or three years after the revolution and do not inquire about the links between earlier and later practices (Liao, 2009; Ruan, 2008, 2009; Li, 2007; Hershatter, 1997; Henriot, 1995; Ma, 1993).

This article investigates those links, taking seriously the claim made, but left largely unsubstantiated, by so many Chinese and English-language studies: when policy makers developed reeducation legislation, they did so within the context of the ongoing efforts to intern and rehabilitate “social parasites.” The rehabilitation of these “ordinary offenders” is the other half of the reeducation story, and it serves as a useful lens for historians because of access to sources. As Frank Dikötter has noted, research on social control in the People’s Republic has been constrained by a lack of empirical evidence: “Internal documents formulated by prison administrations, public security bureaus or other security departments are difficult to find. Indeed anyone found guilty of leaking special classified documents will be convicted of a counter-revolutionary crime” (Dikötter, 1997: 147). While many individuals have taken that risk, and researchers including Dikötter, Fu, and Dutton have gained access to internal documents on policing and prisons, the Chinese authorities have worked hard to protect information about the reeducation of intellectuals, criminals, counterrevolutionaries, and foreigners (Dutton, 2005; Fu, 2005a, 2005b; Dikötter, 1997).

There is more access, however, to documents about the reform of “parasites,” in part because the remolding of prostitutes, and to a lesser extent of beggars and petty thieves, has long been celebrated and publicized as an important post-revolutionary success (Smith, 2009; Henriot, 2001; Hershatter, 1997). Thus, this article uses the sort of documentary evidence that is much less readily available for the study of other reeducated individuals. Through these sources I explore the Beijing institutions that were some of the PRC’s earliest reformatories. Many of the high-ranking cadres and officials who directed the work of these institutions simultaneously held central government positions and drove reeducation policy nationwide. Thus, these capital-city reeducation centers offer a case for exploring the links between central policy and local institutions, as well as the emergence of key tensions between theory and practice that, far from being resolved, continue to shape reeducation in the twenty-first century.

Compassionate Social Relief: A Vision of Ideal Practice

On February 2, 1949, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party sent a telegram congratulating the People’s Army on the liberation of Beijing (Dang’anguan, 1988: 3–4). The new governors imagined their designated capital as a model, command center, and reference point for national social and political transformation, including the countrywide remolding of beggars, prostitutes, vagrants, and pickpockets into members of the laboring masses (Dutton, 2005: 153; Gonganju, 1949). In fact, other municipal leaders rarely followed Beijing’s model (Ma, 1993; Neiwubu, 1953; Huabei renmin zhengfu, 1949). Yet even as regional variation made Beijing unique, the capital city served as a testing ground for national policy, a reservoir of experience that informed the decisions of officials in the central government, many of whom held positions in Beijing’s municipal administration as well (Gonganju, 1949). Those leaders issued, to subordinates nationwide, “guiding principles” for reeducation formulated on the basis of their Beijing-based experience.

When the first PRC Minister of Public Security, Luo Ruiqing, was determining nationwide policy, he was concurrently instituting preliminary social control measures in the capital. In early 1949, Luo and his subordinates in the Beijing Public Security Bureau (PSB) envisioned the restoration of law and order as their central task, and they saw brothels, beggar guilds, and small-time theft rings as potential obstacles. Providing “hideouts, funding, and alibis for escapee landlords, bandits, spies, and traitors,” brothels, vagrant gangs, and criminal networks were political problems that threatened internal security (Dutton, 2005: 150). They were simultaneously social problems, evidence, for the Communists, of the perniciousness of the pre-revolutionary old society. As Mao Zedong had argued in 1939, “China’s status as a colony and semi-colony has given rise to a multitude of rural and urban unemployed. Denied proper means of making a living, many of them are forced to resort to the so-called disreputable and illegitimate professions” (Mao, 1939a: 123).

The claim that the “lumpenproletariat” (youmin wuchanzhe) were at once victims as well as “parasites” with criminal connections was well supported by the work of Party theorists, including Mao, who argued that it was the nature of these individuals to “waver” (dongyao) between revolution and counterrevolution (Mao, 1939a: 123; Peng, [1941] 1981: 14). As early as 1928, Mao was adamant that the only way to win over these “wayward” proletarians was “to intensify political training so as to effect qualitative change in these elements” (Schram, 1969: 71). The Selected Works restated Mao’s instructions succinctly: “We must be adept at reforming them” (Mao, 1939b: 609). Thus, in moving quickly to begin reforming Beijing’s lumpenproletariat, PSB chief Luo had the support of the Central Committee and Beijing’s highest governing body, the Municipal Committee. Beijing’s top official, Politburo member Peng Zhen, his first aide and Central Committee member Liu Ren, and the new mayor Ye Jianying (soon to be a member of the central government’s State Administrative Council) made plans to address politically dangerous social problems with a project they termed “internment and reform” (shourong gaizao) (Ma, 1993: 8–11; Zhongguo da baike quanshu, 1991: 466; Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949b; Ye, 1949: 113–15). In consultation with Luo, as well as officials in the central and local Civil Affairs and Social Relief units, the Municipal Committee formulated regulations on Beijing’s work with beggars, vagrants, petty thieves, and prostitutes. The official guidelines asserted that the purpose of the project was to “maintain public order in the city,” to “eradicate the parasitic population,” to “liberate prostitutes,” and to “provide relief” to the poor, as well as to ensure that internees “receive reform, education, and skills training” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949a, 1949c).

Luo and his comrades decided to proceed rapidly with the internment of “beggars” (qigai), a shorthand for a heterogeneous group of internees whom reeducation-center cadres described as “beggars, petty thieves, pickpockets, and disbanded soldiers” as well as “fugitive landlords,” “disaster victims,” “hooligans,” and “vagrants” (Li, 2007: 61; Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949d). By the end of May, less than a month after the start of the internments, reeducators claimed to have detained more than 1,200 individuals (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949e). The internment of Beijing’s prostitutes (jinü) did not begin until six months later, but when the move came, it was decisive (Cao, 1994: 22; Beijing shi weiyuanhui, 1949a). On November 21, Beijing’s second PRC mayor, Nie Rongzhen, ordered the closure of all the city’s brothels, and within half an hour, Luo led more than two thousand cadres, police officers, students, and medical workers on a raid of the red-light district (Difang zhi, 1999a: 265; Cao, 1994: 22). Between 5:30 pm and 5:30 am, the PSB arrested 424 brothel keepers (Difang zhi, 1999a; Beijing shi minzhengju, 1950a). As Minister Luo lectured these “enemies” about their need to atone, several young female cadres from the Bureau of Civil Affairs and the Women’s Federation met the more than 1,200 interned prostitutes who were about to become their charges (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1950a).

After the initial internments, the police continued to sweep the streets. By the end of 1950, the PSB had captured roughly eight thousand suspects, and after investigating and processing the detainees, the Bureau of Civil Affairs had interned more than 5,000 individuals in thirteen reeducation centers, eight for prostitutes and five for beggars (Gonganju, 1950; Beijing shi minzhengju, 1950a, 1950c). Inside these “Reeducation and Production Institutes” (Shengchan jiaoyang yuan) interned reeducatees lived together with a diverse staff of cadres (ganbu), health-care workers, and police officers. According to a summary of operations submitted to the Municipal Committee by the Bureau of Civil Affairs during the first few weeks of the internment campaign, reeducators first focused on winning the hearts of their detainees: “We demonstrated caring and unity, and sincerely treated [the internees] with respect,” and after a short while, the internees’ “spirits were high” and there was a “harmonious atmosphere” in the institution. The internees’ “fear turned into calm and their suffering turned into happiness” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949d).

Yang Yunyu, a leader in the Women’s Federation who went on to become Vice-Minister of Education, was the chief cadre in charge of the first interned prostitutes. Only thirty years old in 1949, Yang later told interviewers that she and her staff first focused on convincing the prostitutes that while the prerevolutionary society had fomented brutality and exploitation, the new socialist society would foster solidarity and mutual aid. Toward that goal, she ordered her staff to stop using the term “prostitute”: “Rather, we called them students or sisters. We respected them and treated them as equals” (Mi and Gao, 2007: 43). Veteran revolutionary Hou Shufan, Yang’s counterpart in charge of beggars, reportedly oversaw a likeminded effort to foster camaraderie. “Cadres and beggars often go about their daily activities together,” reported the Bureau of Civil Affairs in 1949. “If someone has something to say, they say it, without holding back. We comfort the beggars, teach the beggars, and solve problems on the beggars’ behalf” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949d). The Ministry of the Interior similarly emphasized compassionate solidarity when it formulated nationwide reeducation guidelines, urging cadres to avoid calling their charges “prostitutes, beggars, petty thieves” or other “names that are hurtful to the internees” (Dangdai Zhongguo, 1994: 85; Jiuji fenhui, 1954a). When the Beijing Municipal Committee sent reports to the Central Committee in late 1949, it asserted that reeducators were indeed treating internees with warmth and compassion (Beijing shi weiyuanhui, 1949a).

Yang Yunyu, her reformatory coworker Tan Ying, and reeducators in other cities all emphasized compassionate solidarity in later interviews and memoirs, and the contemporary writers of official Public Security and Civil Affairs histories have similarly stressed the extent to which reformatories in 1949 were intended to be humane social relief institutions (Mi and Gao, 2007; Liang, 1999; Hershatter, 1997; Dangdai Zhongguo, 1994; Gonganju, 1988; Li, 1987). These later accounts mirror the primary sources, which include memos, directives, work reports, and operations summaries. The most detailed are the reports which reformatory staff wrote daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually and which they submitted to the Bureaus of Civil Affairs and Public Security. Cadres in those bureaus compiled their own records and submitted them to the national ministries and the Municipal Committee. The Municipal Committee summarized the details and submitted yet another set of papers to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Approved in their final form by Peng Zhen, head of the Municipal Committee and member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo, these documents were edited and modified as they moved up the chain of command. In 1949, however, they were strikingly similar at all levels, at least insofar as they all advanced an idealized vision of compassionate cadres guiding less fortunate brothers and sisters on a journey of personal transformation.

There is, of course, ample evidence of a much darker reality inside early-1950s reeducation centers. Frequent criticisms of resentful staff, whom superiors admonished for “failing to see that reeducation work is glorious,” suggest that the atmosphere in these institutions was not always “harmonious” and “joyful” (Neibu cankao, Sept. 2, 1952, Oct. 8, 1952; Chen, 1951; Beijing shi weiyuanhui, 1949b). Furthermore, the numerous reports of internees who were bound, hung, humiliated, and even beaten to death by guards belie the claim that the relationship between reeducatees and their reeducators was one of mutual warmth (Jiuji fenhui, 1953a; Neibu cankao, June 12, 1953, June 18, 1953; Wu, 1953; Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949d). Thus, the descriptions in official reports were obviously idealized, but therein lay their significance. In 1949 and 1950, reeducators and their superiors were arguing for an ideal and idealistic kind of thought reform in which reformatories were to be social relief institutions, characterized by compassion and solidarity. Reeducators contrasted this with the much harsher treatment they envisioned for accused “enemies of the people,” such as counterrevolutionaries. The central People’s Government periodically issued guiding principles for cadres working with beggars and prostitutes across the country, and between 1949 and 1951 those principles emphasized classroom education and social relief (Minzhengbu, 2003: 4–5; Dangdai Zhongguo, 1994: 82). Scholars have given these documents a similar reading, noting that the earliest official line about internment and reform was that “prostitutes were not criminalized but treated as victims,” and beggars were seen “not as targets of attack, but as targets of aid” (Quotations from Dutton, 2005: 150; and Liao, 2009: 28; see also Ruan, 2008: 159; Bai, 2002; Hershatter, 1997: 310).

Envisioning Reformatories as Schools: Inside the Reeducation-Center Classroom

In 1949, reeducators and their superiors depicted internment centers as more like charities or schools than prisons. Beijing’s Municipal Committee supported this claim administratively, keeping institutions for beggars and prostitutes separate from the penal system. Whereas Reform-through-Labor institutions for accused “enemies” were directly subordinate to the PSB, it was the Bureau of Civil Affairs and the Social Relief Committee that took primary responsibility for the management of reeducation centers. Beijing was not unique in this respect. In most municipalities, reeducation, like the other social welfare projects to which it was frequently linked, was the responsibility of local Civil Affairs units (Dangdai Zhongguo, 1994: 74, 92). Although the police took an active role in reeducation, reformatories around the country employed staffs consisting largely of teachers, social workers, and nurses (Hershatter, 1997: 309; Li, 1987: 187–89; Dangdai Zhongguo, 1994: 85; Beijing shi minzhengju, 1950c).

When staff members wrote about their methods, they asserted that reformatories were not penal institutions by emphasizing their use of education and downplaying their use of “force” and “forced labor” in particular. Renmin ribao (and various versions of Beijing’s official reeducation regulations) noted as early as 1949 that reformatory internees, especially beggars, could indeed be subject to forced labor, but references to that practice rarely appeared in Beijing’s work reports, situation summaries, memos, or directives before 1951 (Renmin ribao, May 9, 1949; Beijing shi minzhengju, 1950b). To be sure, the official regulations stressed that the primary goal of internment was to “ensure that parasites participate in production,” and Beijing developed its policies in the context of a nationwide directive that “every [internee] with the ability to labor should be placed in a job or organized into labor teams” (Huabei renmin zhengfu, 1949). Crucially, however, the final drafts of Beijing’s official reeducation regulations all stressed that internment centers should achieve this goal by using education to instill “labor skills” and “a love of labor” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949a, 1949c; Huabei minzhengbu, 1949a).

Cadres maintained that they were complying with such instructions, insisting repeatedly that they avoided “force.” Rather, they claimed, their primary and preferred method was to use classroom instruction and verbal persuasion to encourage their charges to engage in production voluntarily (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949d, 1949e, 1949f, 1950a, 1950c). Reports at all levels regularly asserted that before engaging in any form of labor, “having gone through only ordinary education,” the “vast majority of internees” expressed their own desire to begin work (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949d, 1949e, 1949f, 1950a; Beijing shi renmin zhengfu, 1950a, 1950b; Beijing shi weiyuanhui, 1949a, 1949b).

In fact, some writings depicted reeducation centers that were not sites of production at all. In 1949 the Municipal Committee stated that its policy was to intern the very young, the very old, or the disabled while organizing all other individuals with the ability to labor into work teams, but officials also claimed that even young, strong, male beggars were first interned in reeducation centers where they did not take part in labor. Only “after going through education and consciousness raising,” according to the committee, did internees “form labor brigades, which were dispatched to specified destinations to engage in labor and production” (Beijing shi weiyuanhui, 1949b). Reeducators embellished this portrait of reformatories as schools rather than workhouses through the official schedules they created to govern institutional activities. In June 1949, the Bureau of Civil Affairs printed a daily timetable for interned beggars. The timetable did not indicate that internees spent any part of their day laboring, with the possible exception of the time during which they were to “tidy their dormitories.” The rest of their time (between wake-up at 5 am and lights-out at 9:30 pm) was filled with classes, discussions, calisthenics, naps, and two and a half hours of “recreation time” in the evening after dinner (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949e).

A 1950 schedule for interned prostitutes suggested that actual labor was not one of their daily activities either. The prostitutes were to get up at 8 am, clean their rooms, and prepare tea. They attended classes and held discussions during the day. In the evenings they participated in various recreational activities, including singing and dancing, until lights-out at 9 pm. According to reeducators, enforcing a strict regimen helped “teach discipline” and “instill a labor mentality,” but the schedules themselves did not include production (Zhang, 1950: 303). Instead, they suggested that internees spent most of their time in the classroom.

Reformatory staff members devoted large portions of their reports to descriptions of classroom instruction. The reeducation-center curriculum was to begin by teaching beggars and prostitutes to equate their current “improper” occupations with victimization. In 1950, Yang Yunyu’s deputy, Zhang Jiexun, wrote that the teachers’ first task was to select study materials that “exposed the crimes of the brothel owners and keepers, showed how the system of prostitution was created, and explained the inseparable connection between it and the old society” (Zhang, 1950: 304). Internees in all Beijing institutions reportedly read (or had read to them) articles such as “Several Sufferings Caused for Us by the Feudal Society and the Period of Guomindang Rule,” and teachers quickly initiated literacy education. In addition to reading texts, internees also reportedly watched plays and films. Yang Yunyu praised one drama in particular, Sunrise (Richu), for provoking a strong emotional response from interned prostitutes: “The misfortune encountered by the show’s characters . . . elicited [the internees’] empathy. Many people were moved to tears” (Mi and Gao, 2007: 43).

Reeducators claimed that their most effective study materials came not from centrally produced propaganda like the textual and visual materials mentioned above, but rather from the internees’ own personal experiences. Cadres reportedly encouraged internees to “speak bitterness” and “to recount their personal histories of suffering” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1950a). Instructors claimed that once they had elicited statements from individual internees, they then used the “graphic stories from the students’ own lives” to help all of the “students realize the causes of their suffering” and learn to identify “their true enemies” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949e). Speaking bitterness, as Yang Yunyu later explained, taught internees that they had “fallen into improper occupations” because “they came from poor backgrounds” (Mi and Gao, 2007: 43).

Crucially, instructors claimed, these stories also demonstrated that “the imperialists, landlords, and Guomindang bandits were the ones who caused these disasters” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1950a). During one bitterness-speaking session, for example, former beggar Sun Xiangrui reportedly identified the Guomindang as the “enemy” responsible for his suffering. Sun claimed that he had been the owner of a small cigarette stand in the northern city of Zhangjiakou, but in 1936 “Guomindang troops stole every last bit of my stuff and forced me to do hard labor. . . . Since I didn’t have any way to make a living, I roamed the streets, begging in order to survive” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949e). Sun’s reformatory classmate, Liu Zhipeng, was credited with a similar story, in which he identified a landlord as his “enemy”:

When I was young, my family was very poor. My father and I cultivated land for other people to make our living. Every year, the grain we got wasn’t enough to pay the rent. When the landlord asked for the rent, my father didn’t have it. The landlord killed my father, leaving me alone, on the streets, begging in order to survive. (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949e)

The “personal stories” attributed to beggars and prostitutes were strikingly similar in many respects. Among the prostitutes, according to reeducators,

There were those whose families were killed after the Japanese and the imperialists launched murderous raids, and thus they were sold into prostitution. There were those who, because robbery by Guomindang bandits reduced their families to poverty and ruin, were left wandering about in strange towns and were forced into prostitution. There were those who, because they could not pay the landlord’s rents, were seized and sold into prostitution. (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1950a)

Significantly, quotations credited to prostitutes also suggested that reeducators saw a gendered specificity in old-society suffering. However, while report writers highlighted the particularity (gendered and otherwise) of individual suffering, they typically portrayed difference as less significant than similarity. Indeed, it was through speaking bitterness, cadres reported, that internees began to see themselves as united in suffering with other oppressed and exploited members of the Chinese nation. Through the airing of their grievances, according to their mentors, prostitutes and beggars “recognized who our true enemies were, and their minds gradually became clear” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1950a; emphasis added).

If the first step in remolding taught internees to envision themselves as victims of old-society inequalities, the second step encouraged them to volunteer for the labor that would build the new, more egalitarian society. Reeducators claimed that they demonstrated to beggars, prostitutes, and others with “parasitic tendencies” that “despising labor was caused by the ruling class of the old society, and it ensured that working people could never be liberated” (Zhang, 1950: 304). As a result of the revolution, however, “working people are now truly the masters; labor is the most glorious part of the new society” (304). “In New China,” teachers announced, “every person will have work, food, and the ability to read,” but “only if every person participates in labor and production to become self-sufficient” (Liao, 2009: 29). The goal, ostensibly, was to cultivate enthusiasm for the new society and thereby inspire former “parasites” to join the laboring masses.

To nurture labor voluntarism among their students, staff urged them to engage in “self-criticism” by examining their own thoughts and behavior in the context of the education they were receiving. Reeducator Zhang Jiexun credited an unnamed prostitute with the following statement in which the internee first identified the ideological mistakes she had made in the past: “In the past I hated the fact that my father was poor. I hated that I was fated to misfortune.” Then she indicated how she had revised her view after reeducation: “Now I don’t hate fate, and I don’t hate poverty. I understand that my father and I were both victims of the old society” (Zhang, 1950: 310). Another prostitute reportedly said, “In the past I just wanted to find a husband to take care of me. Not now. I want to go to a factory and work” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1950a). Reeducators attributed the following self-criticism to petty thieves Liu Qingxia and Liu Wenming: “In the past we committed a number of criminal acts. From today forward, we must change our outlook on life and resolutely engage in labor and production to support the front lines. Only when we beat the nefarious Jiang Jieshi [Chiang Kai-shek] will we have a future!” (Dang’anguan, 1988: 390).

In the first two years after the revolution, reeducators did, on occasion, claim that after students voiced a voluntary commitment to production, putting them to work could aid in their rehabilitation (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949f, 1950c). However, in those cases, labor was cast as a secondary method, which might further the reeducation process. At least on paper, education was always the primary and preferred agent of reform. In 1949 and 1950, both official guidelines and reports about practice insisted that reform worked best when education and persuasion were the principle motivators, and this pro-education claim had a longevity that extended well beyond the early 1950s. Years later, veteran reeducators continued to portray the earliest PRC reformatories as educational institutions rather than workhouses. Li Peiyi, who had reeducated prostitutes in Kaifeng, later insisted that 1950s internees engaged in production “only after education and consciousness-raising had already been carried out” (Li, 1987: 187). In the 1990s, two women who had worked with prostitutes in the 1950s told Gail Hershatter that the Shanghai Municipal Committee had given them clear instructions: “We wanted to show them some human warmth. We were not to use hitting or cursing as methods of reform, but rather we were to try to persuade and educate them, to raise their consciousness” (Hershatter, 1997: 310). When they recalled Beijing’s first internments, both Yang Yunyu and Zhang Jiexun spoke with some negativity about force as a reeducation method, noting that education and persuasion were far more effective (Gonganju, 1988).

Reformatory staff and their superiors in municipal governments had several incentives to emphasize education, persuasion, and voluntarism. Party rhetoric often invoked the use of forced labor to criticize the way the Japanese and the Guomindang had dealt with beggars, vagrants, and other socially marginalized individuals (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949e, 1950a; Huabei minzhengbu, 1949a, 1949b; on earlier efforts, see Lipkin, 2006; Lu, 2005). As the policies of previous regimes served as a foil for claims about the compassion of the new government, it was crucial that the CCP’s reform methods appear to bear no resemblance to those of its predecessors. Furthermore, Mao had long stressed that, unlike enemies, who should be “forced to reform themselves through labor,” the lumpenproletariat should be “exhorted” and “persuaded,” but not compelled, to join the revolution (Mao, 1926).

It is clear from their written discussions, however, that many reeducators recognized this particular vision of practice as an ideal. Cadres working in reeducation centers admitted that the time devoted to ideological reform was brief (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949d, 1949e, 1950a). Propagandists writing for the Renmin ribao stated that after the short period of classroom education, some reeducatees were still unwilling to labor, and soldiers simply forced them to engage in production (Renmin ribao, May 9, 1949). Even the most polished versions of the official record thus suggest that in 1949 and 1950 forced labor was a reality for many internees. Furthermore, even the most sympathetic reader might wonder how classroom instructors defined “force” or “coercion” so as to exclude incarceration. Such ambiguities, as well as references to “excessive brutality” in reports from Beijing and other cities suggest that many people, from reformatory cadres to Politburo members, were aware of the discrepancy between ideal practice and practical reality (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949d; Tianjin shi minzhengju, 1951).

Reports about reeducation were purposefully idealized, but visions of ideal practice do not seem to have been a cover story for a more sinister, or at least more cynical, program of incarceration and punishment. Indeed, if the overly positive descriptions had been a smokescreen constructed to hide practices that were intentionally more brutal, reeducators would have had little reason to change the content of that obfuscatory discourse. Had they been so inclined, rehabilitators and their superiors could have done what many cadres admit to have done with Mao-era reports: to continue to incorporate positive evidence, either fabricated or selected, into increasingly idealistic and hyperbolic claims. Yet, they did not. Even ideal visions of practice were increasingly less optimistic (and increasingly laudatory of forced labor) in and after 1951.

Resistance, Recidivism, and Forced Labor as Ideal Practice

By 1951, reeducators in Beijing were expressing doubts about the efficacy of current reeducation methods in reforming certain internees. Citing continued resistance from “a small number of bad elements,” some cadres and officials began suggesting that education alone might not always be sufficient. When internees’ “parasitic mindsets are severe,” a reformatory cadre wrote in July, “it might be necessary to force them to labor” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1951). Two months earlier Vice-Minister of the Interior Chen Qiyuan had opened the door for such discussion. In a speech to reeducators nationwide, Chen had announced the State Administrative Council’s latest guiding principle for internment institutions, which favored “combining reeducation with production.” Extolling the rehabilitative virtues of having internees “engage in the actual practice of labor,” Chen had also noted that internees who were unwilling to work could be forced to do so (Chen, 1951).

By the end of 1952, China had 920 reeducation centers countrywide with a total population of more than 446,000 prostitutes, beggars, vagrants, and thieves (Zhongguo da baike quanshu, 1991: 466; Wu, 1953). In 1951 and 1952, as many of those internment institutions were opening across the country, not all reeducators claimed, as Beijing cadres had, that internees were reforming through education alone. In Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Chongqing, staff reported with pride that they organized internees to participate in production from the beginning of the internment period (Huang and Wang, 2010: 78; Hershatter, 1997: 316; Chongqing shi minzhengju, 1950). Despite the new enthusiasm for labor as a reeducation method, neither officials nor reeducators moved away from the emphasis on education as an effective means for reforming internees. Even as Vice-Minister Chen sanctioned force, he still insisted that reeducators should work to convince internees to make a voluntary commitment to labor. “Neglecting education and reform will have a negative result,” Chen remarked as he urged cadres to “rely on developing [internees’] enthusiasm to bring them gradually to self-sufficiency” (Chen, 1951).

In Beijing, cadres, administrators, and officials similarly rehearsed their long-standing commitment to education and persuasion, but they were also increasingly likely to voice concerns about ongoing problems. By late 1951, institution personnel were complaining regularly about severe overcrowding. Cadres in the PSB frequently expressed anxiety about the number of prostitutes and beggars that continued to appear on city streets. And the municipal government expressed its dissatisfaction with rehabilitation practice as it worked to revise the city’s internment and reeducation policies (Gonganju, 1951; Beijing shi renmin zhengfu, 1951). In August 1952, a Bureau of Civil Affairs report claimed that hundreds of prostitutes were soliciting customers in public places (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1952). The bureau noted that during the month of May alone, it had received forty-two letters from urban residents complaining about prostitutes in their neighborhoods and asking the city government to ban prostitution (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1952). Beijing Mayor Nie Rongzhen, who was also a member of the central government’s State Administrative Council, reported that he had received a letter from “a member of the masses.” The letter writer, who claimed to represent several city youths, wrote of prostitutes: “We don’t want to see this kind of thing! We wish the capital city would eradicate this oppressive, exploitive, brutal ravaging of women’s bodies!” (Li, 1995: 29).

When the Bureau of Civil Affairs investigated these complaints, it reported that only a very small number of the accused sex workers were facing economic difficulties; the majority of them were “prostitutes who had been released from the reeducation and production institutes and resumed their old trade” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1952). The same report also complained that petty thieves were prevalent in Beijing. Between January and May 1952, Beijing had tallied 1,006 cases of theft, and a large percentage of the offenders were allegedly thieves who had already undergone reeducation. The report then discussed recidivist beggars and concluded, “Although we have interned them many times, they continue to appear endlessly” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1952).

By 1953, reeducators and police officers were complaining regularly about recidivism, the appearance of new offenders, and internees who were unresponsive to reform. One such complaint concerned a work team of 150 internees bound for the Northwest. Prior to their departure, all of these individuals reportedly received several months of training, which “consisted primarily of ideological education and introducing the situation in the Northwest.” In April, the team headed out, but team leaders alleged that the would-be workers were “not willing to engage in labor and production.” Many ran away while on the road, and when they arrived at their destination, staff had to turn around and take a large group of internees back to Beijing. Apparently, these internees suddenly announced that they had tuberculosis, and under the guiding principle that labor not endanger internee health, cadres claimed that they had no choice but to excuse self-identified tuberculosis sufferers from the work team. The report writer labeled this incident an act of defiance and unwillingness to labor, and cadres insisted that they had been powerless to correct the situation (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1953a).

One reads in this and other reports from 1953 what seems like sincere frustration among reeducators (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1953a; Jiuji fenhui, 1953a, 1953c, 1953d; Jiancha weiyuanhui, 1953). Despite highly publicized proclamations, the new government had not managed to rid the capital of beggars, prostitutes, and petty thieves. Reeducators insisted that many of these individuals were resolutely unwilling to reform, even after ideological education. Amid this waning enthusiasm, the central government launched an investigation into reeducation-center practices nationwide. In May, the Ministry of the Interior issued directives to the Bureaus of Civil Affairs in all cities, provinces, and regions, calling for the “rectification” (zhengdun) of all reeducation centers. “Over the past several years, reeducation and production institutes in each locality have carried out large internments of urban beggars and prostitutes,” the ministry summarized before narrating a series of mass escapes, reformatory riots, and internee refusals to participate in either education or labor. Officials attributed many recent problems with resistant internees to cadre error, claiming that when “internees made trouble” and “refused to accept discipline,” cadres ineffectually “instituted crude and simplistic practices in response” (Neiwubu, 1953).

Several months later, at December’s national Civil Affairs conference, the secretary-general of the central Social Relief Committee, Wu Yunfu, summarized the rectification reports from around the country. Wu expressed concern that reeducators were not striking a balance between education and labor:

A one-sided emphasis on production and self-sufficiency, going after profits alone, or hiring workers to run operations or any such practices are all incorrect because they substantively change the mission and character of the reeducation and production system. Conversely, just one-sidedly emphasizing political and ideological education, without organizing labor and production, is also incorrect. It not only makes it difficult to realize the goal of reforming vagrants, but it is also out of step with the spirit of the “increasing production and practicing economy” campaign. (Wu, 1953)

Throughout 1953, centrally mandated guiding principles ordered reformatories to “combine education and production.” Legislation in many cities revealed an increasing emphasis, even at the level of ideal practice, on having internees engage in labor in addition to undergoing ideological education (Renmin ribao, Jan. 13, 1954; Changsha fenhui, 1953; Nanjing shi minzhengju, 1953; Shanghai fenhui, 1953; Zhengzhou shi, 1953). Beijing reports were increasingly dominated by discussions about the benefits of “reform through the actual practice of labor.” The word “actual” (shishi) distinguished new policies from the earlier practices, which cadres claimed relied primarily on classroom education to cultivate “labor skills” and “labor mentalities” without concurrently organizing internees in production.

A quarterly work summary from August 1953 cited ex-beggar Li Lin as an example of “a great number of internees” who “having gone through the practice of actual labor and production, gradually transformed past bad mindsets or bad habits and recognized the gloriousness of labor.” When Li was first interned, he “caused trouble” and “was famous for refusing to accept discipline.” After he joined a work team, however, his “mindset underwent a transformation.” Cadres praised the former troublemaker as a hard worker who often “provided information to the leadership,” and Li himself was quoted as saying, “Inside the [reeducation] center, there was no way out. I was miserable and bored, so I made trouble. Now, engaging in labor and production, I have a future. Relying on yourself is a good thing to do.” Adding several similar examples, the report concluded, “education through the actual practice of labor gradually fosters a habit of loving labor” (Jiuji fenhui, 1953b).

Two months later, however, the Municipal Committee’s Office of Policy Research reported to city leaders that about a quarter of the internees in one institution had “long refused to participate in production.” Apparently, “cadres in the center had criticized and educated them many times, all to no avail” (Zhengce yanjiushi, 1953). Reeducators had reportedly tried a number of mobilizational strategies, including raising the monetary rewards given to internees who worked and decreasing the food given to those who did not. Yet apparently only a handful of people had responded to these new methods. As for the others,

They sleep all day and read fiction. Cadres are unable to do anything about it. After the Bureau of Civil Affairs conducted this year’s investigation and rectification, there have been no more instances of beating or abusing internees . . . but when [internees] cause trouble and create discord, [cadres] do not have suitable methods to control them. A portion of the internees absolutely refuses to obey cadre discipline. There is chaos in the center. . . . There are those [internees] who have the audacity to say: “The [rectification campaign] brought the cadres down. Now this is my kingdom.” (Zhengce yanjiushi, 1953)

In addition to refusing to work, internees were reportedly stealing government property, organizing riots, advancing reactionary ideas, and raping other internees (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1953b; Zhengce yanjiushi, 1953). Cadres wrote that they were exhausted and unable to gain control. According to Office of Policy Research, the institution had only “one cadre in charge of discipline,” and that person was “so busy dealing with internee petitions for leave or with requests to see the doctor that [s/he] rarely [had] time to deal with fighting or to mediate in disputes.” The report continued, “Other than asking the Public Security Bureau to arrest those who don’t accept discipline, cadres in the center have no methods to control these people” (Zhengce yanjiushi, 1953). Even the threat of arrest, according to reeducators, was insufficient deterrence for some internees: “They do not care at all about being sent to the Public Security Bureau or to the courts. They say: ‘It’s the same there, you still eat steamed buns.’ Or ‘Fine. The eating is better at the courts. The living conditions are better. The labor skills studied there are much better than here. I am perfectly willing to go’” (Zhengce yanjiushi, 1953).

In 1954, the Bureau of Civil Affairs insisted that having internees “engage in the actual practice of labor” had “decreased the chaos in the reeducation work units” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1954a), but in the same month the Social Relief Committee said of Beijing reformatories: “Cadres are few and discipline is not strict. Internees regularly use going to the doctor, getting water, or getting food as a chance to run away. Between January and March of this year alone, twenty-two people ran away” (Jiuji fenhui, 1954b). The Bureau of Civil Affairs contended that the problems occurred because cadres had not “ensured all internees were participating in the actual practice of labor” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1954a) and that when staff organized production effectively, the results were good: “The majority of those [internees] who have gone through labor exercises were able to overcome problems and stick to the labor. Most of those who did physical labor received the work site supervisor’s praise and encouragement. Some individuals were even hired on as long-term workers” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1954a).

As superiors came to support “reform through the actual practice of labor,” they were increasingly likely to suggest that education and persuasion be augmented with harsher methods. In 1954, the Bureau of Civil Affairs stipulated, “internees who have received education many times but have not reformed or those who refuse to accept discipline should be sent to the Public Security Bureau to undergo reform through forced labor” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1954a). When taking part in labor became the means, instead of simply the end to the reform process, reeducators began to acknowledge the use of “force” as appropriate and even desirable.

By 1954, discussions about reeducation had lost much of the optimism of the earlier years. While reeducators still claimed important victories, their summaries began to feature problems and failures more prominently than successes. A Bureau of Civil Affairs report from that year claimed that most current internees had been reeducated at least once before and “had returned to their old habits after their release” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1954b). In June, Beijing once again revised reeducation legislation. The new regulations stated, “Each internee must engage in labor and production, live self-sufficiently, accept discipline, and accept reform and education” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1954c). By the time the municipal authorities ratified the new rules, reeducators had long since stopped claiming to rely on education and verbal persuasion alone to motivate internees to labor. In accordance with earlier directives from the Ministry of the Interior, reeducators in 1954 regularly cited the “guiding principle of self-sufficiency,” and cadres reported that they were following this guideline when they reduced the amount of food given to internees who “loafed, ran away, or resisted labor” (Jiuji fenhui, 1954b). Further citing the complementary guiding principle of “labor more, receive more; labor less, receive less,” reeducators increasingly asserted that such graduated reward systems were effective in “encouraging [internees’] enthusiasm for labor” (Jiuji fenhui, 1954b).

Yet, cadres reported, the situation continued to deteriorate. In fact, according to a November report from the municipal Social Relief Committee, graduated reward systems had created, or aggravated, another type of “mindset problem.” Apparently, when internees received their pay,

they feast and drink heavily. There are some who, during a single meal, want firsts, seconds, and thirds. . . . There are those for whom a month’s worth of meal tickets doesn’t last a month. They regularly borrow money or meal tickets from other people.

This report was neither the first nor the last to conclude, “Although they have received education many times, they have failed to reform” (Jiuji fenhui, 1954b). By 1956, the Beijing Bureau of Civil Affairs still housed thousands of internees, and new offenders arrived every day. A September summary complained that Beijing’s prostitutes, beggars, and petty thieves were “retaining their old habits.” In addition to reoffending, when they were interned, these “parasites” reportedly refused to labor, fought with one another, and stole things from inside the internment centers. Cadres claimed that they “[did] not have effective methods to stop this” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1956).

In August 1957 the “Decision of the State Council Regarding the Question of Reeducation through Labor” relieved beleaguered Civil Affairs reeducators and codified the dramatic re-articulation of thought-reform policy that had evolved during the first near-decade of practical experience in reformatories. The 1957 Decision transferred responsibility for all PRC reeducation centers from local Bureaus of Civil Affairs to local Public Security organs. Although Civil Affairs units were expected to play a continuing role, the Decision reversed the earlier division of labor and ordered Public Security agents to carry out the daily work of reeducating all internees, regardless of classification. Thus, in addition to their ongoing management of Reform through Labor, PSB personnel were now charged with the rehabilitation of “persons with the ability to labor who loaf, who violate law and discipline, or who do not engage in proper employment” (Guowuyuan, 1957). The Decision further stipulated that all reformatories should employ “education combined with the actual practice of labor” and that reeducators should force unwilling internees to participate.

In Beijing, the Municipal Committee made arrangements to comply with the new legislation, transferring the capital’s eight remaining reeducation centers to the control of the Office for Reeducation through Labor. Although the committee appointed An Lin of the PSB and Cheng Shulin of the Bureau of Civil Affairs as joint chiefs, the Office was housed at PSB headquarters (the old reeducation office had been located at the Bureau of Civil Affairs) and PSB officers staffed the newly named Reeducation-through-Labor facilities (Difang zhi, 1999b: 257). Social-relief workers were no longer charged with reeducation duties. According to the new regulations, Civil Affairs cadres might offer temporary care to detained vagrants or mendicants, but such individuals were to be sent back to their hometowns or assembled into labor teams as soon as possible. Civil Affairs personnel were to transfer custody of captured prostitutes, thieves, repeat beggars, or those who “refused to accept discipline” to the PSB (Beijing shi weiyuanhui, 1958). PSB reeducators began accepting these new internees on September 6, 1957, and by September 30 they claimed to have interned 1,707 people, 1,595 men and 112 women. By the end of the year, the total number had jumped to 3,845 (Difang zhi, 1999b: 380).

Despite the administrative shift, in Beijing and elsewhere, there were very few practical differences between the methods reeducators and their superiors were advocating by 1956 and those mandated in 1957 (Huang and Wang, 2010). As Huang and Wang have argued, the Decision merely formalized changes already underway. As early as 1956, for example, the Women’s Reeducation and Production Institute in Shanghai was already called the Women’s Reeducation through Labor Institute (Huang and Wang, 2010: 79). Indeed, the language of the 1957 Decision echoed, at least in part, the changes in policies and practices that had evolved over nearly a decade of efforts to reeducate “parasites”:

Reeducation through labor is a coercive measure for carrying out education and reform. . . . [Reeducators] should follow the guiding principle of combining labor and production with political education . . . to help [internees] establish a mentality of patriotic observance of law, [develop an appreciation] of the gloriousness of labor, learn labor and production skills, and cultivate the habit of loving labor, so that they become self-sufficient laborers who participate in socialist construction. (Guowuyuan, 1957)

There are thus striking continuities between the 1957 Decision and earlier discussions about reeducation, suggesting that while the CCP’s suppression of counterrevolutionaries was certainly germane to the development of Reeducation through Labor, equally constitutive were the early-PRC efforts to reform the elements déclassés.

Conclusion

Between 1949 and 1958, the ideal practice of reeducation changed in large part because rehabilitators believed that the nature of their targets had changed. When they launched Beijing’s internment and reform efforts in 1949, municipal officials instructed reeducators-in-training that the lumpenproletariat included “members of the laboring masses whom thousands of years of feudal, bureaucratic control had forced into bankruptcy and unemployment” (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949g). Beijing reeducators followed theorists like Mao Zedong and Peng Zhen in characterizing their internees as “dual-natured” (Mao, 1926, 1939a; Peng, [1941] 1981; see also Hershatter, 1997: 310). Yet even that “two-faced” quality was symptomatic of old-society oppression. As senior reeducator Tan Ying put it, most of her 1949 internees “came from the laboring people,” but “their living environment had influenced them and led them to fear hard work and prefer indolent and parasitic lifestyles” (Liang, 1999: 8; Dang’anguan, 1988). In the years just after the revolution, rehabilitators and their superiors cast lumpenproletarians as victims, as powerless members of the oppressed classes who were “forced” into their “illegitimate” occupations (Mao, 1939a: 123).

By 1957, however, the leaders of a new China insisted that old-society villains no longer divested individuals of their roles as laborers, and more than ten thousand reeducators around the country had expended years of effort to restore “wayward” workers to their “rightful” place as producers (Dashiji, 2003: 4–5; Zhongguo da baike quanshu, 1991: 466). As those same rehabilitators had provided countless hours of political education, there was no defense for individuals who continued to harbor “parasitic thoughts and inclinations.” In this context, the agents of the PRC state came to view parasitism an act of volition, evidence not of victimization but of a stubborn resistance to reform. Reeducators and officials claimed publicly that “after undergoing only ordinary education, the vast majority of internees underwent a transformation,” and thus mindsets that were as yet unrehabilitated signaled ideological problems of a different order (Beijing shi minzhengju, 1949e, 1949f, 1950a, 1950c; Renmin ribao, May 26, 1949; Zhang, 1950).

Vexed by recidivist “parasites” and unwilling laborers, rehabilitators began to argue in favor of compulsory conscription, the method PRC reformers had long used to target individuals with “serious” ideological deviations, such as the counterrevolutionaries with whom the lumpenproletariat were interned after 1957. There were, of course, several practical incentives for the turn toward a greater emphasis on labor. As the costs of post-revolutionary national reconstruction were exacerbated by the Korean War, disappointing agricultural production, and Soviet loan-repayment demands, ensuring that reformatory internees achieved “self sufficiency” seemed a fitting response to rising expenses. Superiors pressured their subordinates to increase domestic production, and cadres were less willing to tolerate “non-productive elements.” When educators reported that even primary school children “studied half the day and labored half the day,” it might well have seemed outrageous if prostitutes, beggars, and thieves were allowed to “lounge on [their] beds all day, staring off into space,” as they had been accused of doing by one reformatory chief in 1953 (Jiancha weiyuanhui, 1953).

Importantly, however, the greater reliance on forced labor did not indicate an abandonment of the reformist agenda. As Dutton and Dikötter, among others, have shown, the Chinese Communists drew inspiration from reformers around the world who expressed a fervent faith in the redemptive and rehabilitative capacities of physical work (Dutton, 1992; Dikötter, 2002; see also, Mühlhahn, 2009: 149–53; Williams and Wu, 2002: 9–13; Seymour and Anderson, 1998). Whether or not individual officials or reeducators believed in the reformative power of labor, they clearly posited conscription as a means to an end. As we saw earlier, an oft-repeated refrain among reeducators insisted, “Internees should engage in production so that they learn the gloriousness of labor.” The conversations between reeducators and their superiors tracked in this article make clear that when the state incarcerated the lumpenproletariat, the ideal outcome was always the creation of willing workers. Precisely because the events of the 1950s placed huge demands on the new economy, and internment was expensive, reeducators made a compelling case for the practical utility of real reform. By 1957, the agents of the PRC government were expressing an explicit bias against expensive, space- and labor-intensive internment and searching for methods that would speedily and effectively integrate internees into the regular work force. Ensuring that those former “parasites” joined the national production effort as voluntary, enthusiastic participants was crucial because it lessened the likelihood of recidivism and re-internment.

Thus, the emphasis on true reform was as practical as it was idealistic. It was also elusive, and the problem in 1957 was the same as it had been when Mao discussed reeducation in 1928: what are the methods and possibilities for effecting qualitative change? As the records from Beijing’s early reformatories suggest, the turn to harsher methods reflected the frustration of reeducators faced with prostitutes, beggars, and petty thieves who simply refused to reform. In that dismay, however, was evidence of the idealism that had fueled the thought-reform project. Reeducators like Yang Yunyu, Zhang Jiexun, Tan Ying, and Li Peiyi wrote with enthusiasm about their belief that the ideals of Chinese Communism could compel social change. Decades later, those now-seasoned members of the political elite continued to espouse a belief in the transformative power of thought reform. They also spoke about their shock and utter incomprehension at the fierce resistance they encountered from those they hoped to save (Mi and Gao, 2007; Liang, 1999; Gonganju, 1988; Li, 1987).

Fu Hualing has shown that while some present-day prison guards are more cynical, many contemporary reeducators still hope to create positive change in their charges. To be sure, “political and financial constraints effectively defeat the reformist agenda,” as, I would add, does the resistance of internees who accept neither the narrative of redemption nor the mantle of productive labor (Fu, 2005b: 812). The case of 1950s Beijing reveals that the contemporary sanction was in fact forged through that very tension, as early reeducators tried to reconcile the contradictions between idealism (bolstered by reports of early successes) and the reality of economic pressures and internee resistance to reform. Far from having resolved these contradictions, the 1957 Decision reified them, leading to the situation that Fu and others have observed, in which the more optimistic reeducators see their work as a sincere but ultimately frustrated attempt to foment true transformation in their internees.

If contemporary detainees and pundits alike find reeducators’ idealistic claims hollow at best and hypocritical at worst, their response probably confirms the much greater emphasis in reform institutions on policing and production. But the sense of disconnectedness might also result because echoes of revolutionary-era optimism about the positive power of thought reform do not resonate when they are divorced from their historical context and interpreted solely as components of post-socialist discourses. The “reeducation” in Reeducation through Labor may, in practice, be more window-dressing than reality, but there is more at stake than political whitewashing. Also on the line is the veracity of the promise of social transformation on which a party vanguard staked its legitimacy. Contemporary leaders continue to be vexed by the ongoing contradiction between the theoretical ideal of harmony and the practical reality of resistance.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Michael Dutton, Matthew Johnson, Ruth Rogaski, Steve Smith, and Modern China’s anonymous referees for insightful comments that helped me think through many of the issues I address in this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author conducted part of the research for this article while in China on a Fulbright fellowship.

Biography

Aminda M. Smith is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Michigan State University.

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