Progressive Labor Party was established in 1965, just one year before the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Our Chinese comrades influenced our political line and inspired our work. They showed us the critical importance of breaking with revisionism — the fake-leftist ideology, put forward by “capitalist roaders,” that actually serves the bosses. They demonstrated the power of the collective. They taught us the importance of leadership from the masses, and the need to rely on workers over elite experts and technocrats. The Chinese comrades’ experience also underlined the danger of keeping remnants of capitalism — like money and wages — in a worker-run state, and how these elements pave the road to revisionism and the return of full-blown capitalism.
The first three parts of this first-person account told the story of a Chinese village factory and its workers—how their lives were changed by the Cultural Revolution and changed again by the CR’s reversal. Part Four illustrates the widening inequalities as Chinese society has continued to deteriorate since the Cultural Revolution was defeated.
Guan Dunxiao, another who bought a share of the village factory, became the most successful entrepreneur in our county. In 1987, he paid close to one million yuan in taxes. As the county’s biggest taxpayer, he was invited to join the Communist Party and became deputy chairman of the county’s political consultation conference. Most of the workers from the original factory left him.
Guan Dunxiao helped his younger brother, Guan Dunjia, who was only a teenager when I worked at the factory, take over the county’s bus operation. This eventually earned him twenty million yuan a year.
Guan Dunyan, the manager before me, left the factory as soon as Deng Xiaoping began to privatize collective assets. He sold things on the markets and used the money to buy land when the price was very low. He now lives off the land he bought in the early days and rented to others to build factories.
Altogether, there are now a dozen people in the village with assets over one hundred million yuan. One-third of the villagers are millionaires; another third live comfortably; the rest are struggling to survive.
Among the losers, a few stand out. Fu Xisan, the man who advised me not to go college, died in his fifties of liver cancer three months after the village factory was privatized. He put more than ten years of his life into the factory and was devastated by what happened there. Many people thought he died of anger. When I went to see his family on my winter break, his widow said sadly, “The village has really changed since you left.”
Wang Siyong, one of my earlier colleagues in the factory, fared badly as well. He was two years older than I, and we’d played together as boys. We worked on the same eighth production team. After the factory was privatized, Wang left to set up his own enterprise. But his operation failed. On top of that, his brother-in-law, who’d been working for him, ran away with a lot of money. Wang was buried in debt. He sold the family house and everything he owned to pay his creditors. He died in his early forties, leaving behind a wife and two daughters to fend for themselves without him.
Liu Enxun was the factory electrician in the early years. After privatization, he went to work for Guan Dunxiao. But his wife fell seriously ill, and for years Liu spent all his income on her medical treatments. Eventually his wife died. Whenever I met him, he would tell me he was the poorest man in the village and relied on government relief money to get enough to eat.
Liu’s younger brother, Liu Qixun lived in similar poverty and had a tragic life. His only son was killed by a traffic accident at the age of 15. His distraught wife left him to live in another place. Just one year older than me, he had aged beyond his years.
Wang Xuejin, the secret weapon, had his share of sadness as well. His oldest son, Wang Daying, was a highly intelligent person and a talented painter and musician. He could listen to a new song once and play it back on his erhu, the two-stringed Chinese fiddle. But he was socially awkward and found it difficult to get up in the morning. When we worked in the fields together, I would wake him up every morning. After I went to work in the factory, somebody else did the same. But once the collective was broken up, nobody bothered to wake him anymore.
In the end, his wife divorced him and left the village with their son. Wang Daying became depressed and in 1998 he hanged himself. For Wang Xuejin, it was a great tragedy in his old age to bury his beloved son.
Fu Xisan was the first person to die prematurely of disease in fifteen years in my village. But several others soon followed him. Wang Fangjun died in 1980, in his 40s; his half-brother Lu Sihai, in 1982, in his 30s; Guan Dunxie in 1983, in his 50s; Liu Chengrui in 1985, in his 40s. All of these men were from my old production team. Other teams in the village suffered similar losses.
Why were all these people dying young? Once the collective was broke up, it marked the end of free medical care and free education in the village. Our sense of community was gone, and everybody was struggling to get ahead. The stress of competition took its toll on the people. The disintegration of our village is a microcosm of how China fell apart after the defeat of the GPCR.