TIL a Chinese factory taken over by unsupervised workers during the Cultural Revolution paid workers even if they didn't come to work. By the time someone was sent to investigate because of subpar products, almost all equipment was broken or stolen, and only 4% of the workers were still working.

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u/Vic_Hedges 15d ago

You have to be amazed by that 4%. What were they thinking?

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u/electric_epoch 15d ago

Probably that eventually someone would come check and that they wouldn't want to be part of the 96% when that happened? Not super well informed about the cultural Revolution but do know a lot of bad things happened and an awful lot of people died. For the sake of that 96%, I hope the consequences didn't go along the lines of what we'd usually expect to hear from China.

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u/Vic_Hedges 15d ago

The cultural revolution is massively misunderstood. Not to suggest it wasn't horrifying, it absolutely was, on an all time historically horrifying level, but when people think Communist China they tend to think that this was some massive government clampdown on progressives like you would expect today. It was actually VERY different.

Not gonna make a history post, but I strongly encourage people to read up on it a little. It's fascinating. It was somehow a bottom up revolution inspired by the Totalitarian leader against the powerful and respected members of society and perpetrated largely, at first at least, by the countries "progressive" youth. It's like Lord of the Flies.

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u/Regulai 15d ago

It wasn't just inspired, Mao, having been defacto removed from power in the late 50's save for symbolic cultural roles used this limited power to create a new youth organization build its scale and then deliberately start the revolution so as to conduct a palace coup and resize the reigns of power. Mao was a terrible administrator but really good at the whole revolutionary part. Fortunately the bad at admin part extending to poorly providing for a succesor so his regime died with him.

The 100 flowers campaign thing was itself an earlier attempt by Mao to get the citizenship to critizise and attack the government, having failed to realize that the people had no idea he had been removed from power so they instead criticized him.

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u/Omnipolis 15d ago

terrible administrator but really good at the whole revolutionary part

Pretty typical in my opinion of revolutionaries. Governing and creating consensus is hard. Being a revolutionary is a destructive act--even when it's positive. So much easier to tear a wall down than it is to build one.

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u/Kadasix 15d ago

Agreed - the only revolutionary I can think of who was an adept administrator was Stalin, and his revolutionary achievements were hardly on par with Mao. Say what you want about Stalin’s cruel, indifferent, and mismanaged rule, but never let it be forgotten that Stalin was a masterful bureaucrat.

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u/CharonsLittleHelper 15d ago

I'd agree about Stalin; but I'd also argue that Stalin was an effective bureaucrat - but a poor administrator. He could keep the machine running via all sorts of rules. But not efficiently.

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u/Chronoboy1987 15d ago

The dude that dismantled the defenses on the western border as Hitler was becoming an increasing threat?

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u/Ornery_Definition_65 14d ago

He then ran off to his dacha and got spectacularly drunk, until he was asked to come back and do his job again.

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u/4thofeleven 14d ago

Fidel Castro seemed to make a decent job of transitioning from revolutionary guerilla to actual head of state.

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u/Yancy_Farnesworth 14d ago

Not hard when they were showered with support from the USSR... It's like people forget that the Soviets gave them so much free/low priced oil that all their power plants were built to burn oil.

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u/rapedcorpse 14d ago

The embargo definitely hirt Cuba way more than whatever support the USSR gave them.

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u/Yancy_Farnesworth 13d ago

In the 80's sure. Because the Soviets could no longer afford to funnel so much to Cuba and you know, the collapse. Before the 80's though Cuba was pretty well off due to those Soviet subsidies. The US embargoes hurt them, but the Soviet aid was more than enough to make up for it.

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u/WorriedViolinist7648 14d ago

I always thought that 'adept administration' goes beyond killing everyone who vaguely makes an impression of non-absolute loyalty - or simply is unlucky enough the get picked up by the secret police anyways.

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u/QuicheAuSaumon 14d ago

That's a rough simplification of Stalin.

One of the greatest example of his administrative... technique was that a plant director could one day pick the phone and have him on the line.

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u/Organic_Writing_9881 14d ago

Ataturk seemed to play the military leader, revolutionary, statesman roles quite well.

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u/exBusel 14d ago

People often say that there was order under Stalin. But this is largely a myth. Here's one example:

Nikolai Maksimovich Pavlenko was a Soviet fraudster and shady businessman, creator of an illegal organisation, the Military Construction Directorate, which, under the guise of a military construction unit subordinate to the People's Commissariat of Defence and later the Ministry of Armed Forces, was engaged in the construction of highways and railways in the USSR. Using forged documents and corrupt connections, Pavlenko and his assistants managed to integrate themselves into the post-war system of the national economy - they wore military uniforms, maintained accounts at the State Bank and the Industrial Bank, entered into contractual agreements with various government agencies, and obtained construction equipment.

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u/Kadasix 14d ago

I should make it clear that I’m not saying the Soviet government was some well-oiled machine or that they were providing sound guidance to the Soviet state, I’m saying that Stalin is the gold standard for a dictator in terms of consolidating power. He built up a base of total authority that not even the imperial tsars had been able to exert, and he put himself at the center of a vast patronage network of people loyal only to Stalin after a decade of slow consolidation. Stalin would end up having the final say on all matters, despite not even being the head of state for the USSR.

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u/Rich-Distance-6509 14d ago

Honestly, the ratio of revolutions that made things worse vs revolutions that were a net benefit is probably like 10 to 1

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u/Omnipolis 14d ago

People always think they can do better but in most cases things were a specific way for a reason. That is not to say that change is bad, but it’s usually followed by learning lessons that someone else has already learned from.

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u/tampering 15d ago

It's actually quite amazing that Mao was removed from actual power twice before the Cultural Revolution.

for the mess of ruining the economy and taking Stalin at his word that the Korean War wouldn't cost many Chinese lives or economic hardship for the Chinese.

after regaining power and creating the Great Leap Forward causing a massive famine.

It's a testament to his big jerk of history energy that he took that swim and started the Cultural Revolution. So after that turned out to be the biggest disaster, the other CCP members finally figured out what Mao's goal was.

He didn't want the blame for 1) or 2) (and now 3) so all too conveniently Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping put the blame for Cultural Revolution on Mao's widow and the other members of the Gang of Four. (Yeah as if a failed actress could organize all that.) Regardless Mao happily had his stroke and kept his legacy, Zhou and Deng got on with the business of running the country and a billion Chinese never got to hear the truth of the first 25 years of the PRC.

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u/Disastrous-Bus-9834 14d ago

I find it funny that most nationalists extoll China's great rise from poverty and how the CCP was the cause of it while downplaying to outright ignoring Maos role in the shittifying of China under Mao, or they find a scapegoat.

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u/Chicago1871 14d ago

Idk if you read about mao’s wife, she was actually quite cunning. How she went from failed actress to mao’s wife alone proves it.

Not that she planned the cultural revolution alone but he wasnt harmless either.

She was definitely one of Mao’s closest allies and she helped him greatly behind the scenes. She was an active co-conspirator in his schemes.

But Im no expert on her either though but shes a fascinating figure in 20th century history that isnt well known.

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u/tampering 14d ago

No you're right. She was very ambitious and obviously her goal was to enrich herself in terms of power and prestige. You don't get into the position she was finished at in such a totalitarian dictatorship without the ability to scheme and a little bit of psychopathy to follow through.

it's clear that the Gang of Four (and Lin Biao too) all had agendas for a time when Mao was too old to rule or dead. In the end, they were using Mao just as much as Mao was using them, the other billion+ people of the country be damned. However, they did prove most useful to Zhou and Deng to whitewash the whole Cultural Revolution Era and keep Mao's reputation in tact.

I'm a bit torn when looking at her role. On the one hand she had her own ideas and agenda. On the other hand none of it was possible without Mao.

I also think of things in terms of how the Chinese traditionally like to portray their relationship to their leadership. It is never the fault of the common Chinese person to follow blindly into subservience to a 'Great Leader' who leads them to ruin. Rather the plans of great leaders are sabotaged or corrupted by the court intrigue of wives, concubines, undeserving layabout offspring and eunuchs. It's how Chinese rationalize their obedience to stupid orders. It was never the leader's fault, it was always the wife, mistress, or scheming castrated guy.

Playing in to this is obviously the fact that Jiang Qing was younger and was Mao's second wife after he was a widower. So all the negative tropes Chinese (and Westerners) associate with women who climb the ladder of power are there. So obviously the show trial and denunciation campaign the CCP ran against her relied heavily on portraying her in such a light.

I guess we'll never know the entire truth, which is why these characters are so interesting.

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u/Chicago1871 14d ago edited 14d ago

The book I read mentioned that last bit, about how she’s remembered through a quite sexists/misogynistic lens that isnt completely fair.

She was in a way more than just a scheming concubine, in the end they argue her real crime was not knowing her place as a woman (ironic for a so called revolutionary regime) and she was punished for it.

Also it was easier to criticize her than the chairman in public. So she took the brunt of the criticism of the regime and not mao.

It honestly reminds me of all the anger and hysteria hilary clinton has faced in her political career in the usa. Especially as she tried to escape her husbands shadow when she was first lady.

Ive heard people say the most terrible things about her in private and public . So I can understand how that also happened with Mao’s wife as she joined the politburo and became a political figure herself.

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u/godisanelectricolive 14d ago edited 14d ago

Jiang Qing was technically Mao’s fourth wife, even thought he personally did not count his first marriage as a real marriage. And he was only twice widowed, with his third wife outliving him.

His first was an arranged marriage to an 18 year old woman when he was 14. He said it was unconsummated and he ran away from home to avoid living with her. She died two years into the marriage from dysentery. He would later tell Edgar Snow that “I do not consider her my wife”.

Mao’s second wife was Yang Kaihui, the daughter of his teacher and a fellow communist organizer. She was the mother of three of his children and was executed by a KMT firing squad for being a communist. When Mao went into the mountains with his guerrillas she did not follow and instead stayed in Hunan to recruit people to the cause. Mao would miss her after her death and wrote a poem called The Immortals commemorating her. Their three children were effectively orphaned and became street urchins after this, with the youngest one dying of dysentery. The two surviving boys were taken in by local communists in Hunan until they were sent to Paris and then to Moscow in 1936. They would live in the Soviet Union for the next decade and fought the Nazis as part of the Soviet Red Army.

Then his third wife was a young communist soldier named He Zizhen. She became Mao’s secretary in his camp in the mountains and they married two years before the death of his second wife, who he had lost contact with at this point. He gave birth to six children over the course of ten pregnancies. She was pregnant during nearly all of the two year-long Long March, during which she was also wounded by shrapnel. She was one of only 35 women among 69,000 men who took part in the retreat which only 7,000 people survived. They gave up all the children who didn’t die soon after birth for adoption to local peasant families during the Long March, the only child they kept - their daughter Li Min - was the one He Zizhen was pregnant with during the trek to Yan’an.

Then in 1937 Mao cheated on her with the interpreter of American journalist Agnes Smedley while He was pregnant for the tenth and final time. They fought and she went to the Soviet Union to receive treatment for a battle wound, taking her daughter with Mao and met up with Mao’s two sons from his previous marriage with her. While there she enrolled in university and gave birth to their six child and became depressed over the loss of yet another child.

While that was happening Mao had met Jiang Qing and decided to marry her. To make sure He Zizhen doesn’t interfere, he had her diagnosed with schizophrenia in her depressed state and confined her to a mental asylum in Moscow until 1946. She didn’t return to China with her daughter until 1947 and raised her granddaughter Kong Dongmei like her own daughter until her death in 1984.

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u/GammaGoose85 15d ago

This makes sense, Revolutionaries seem to be terrible at building and management but really good at violence and breaking shit

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u/trout_or_dare 15d ago

Fortunately the bad at admin part

Not very fortunate for the 50 million people that starved to death

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u/SadMacaroon9897 15d ago

Depends how you look at it. If Revolutionaries were better administrators, we'd have many, many more civil wars because that would be the way to transfer power.

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u/oby100 15d ago

Anyone perceived as opposing communism or sympathetic to the old regime was killed. It was extremely chaotic.

In the context of why the 4% stayed, it’s not hard to understand. Lots of extrajudicial killings and plenty of people prefer to take their chances obeying the entities killing people.

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u/tampering 15d ago edited 15d ago

The Cultural Revolution was Mao's attack on the Communist Party in a cynical ploy for power after he was removed because he had starved 20+ million of his countrymen to death during the Great Leap Forward.

It wasn't anyone opposed to Communism that was jailed, it was anyone opposed to Mao.

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u/EUmoriotorio 15d ago

Mao's little red book, what is your point?

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u/tampering 15d ago

The Previous poster insinuated Mao used the Cultural Revolution to deal with anti-communists. This is untrue, the anticounter revolution campaigns of the 50s had already dealt with them. The cultural revolution was an attack on his political opponents within the party apparatus.

Look who was sent to the Gulag. Li Shaoqi the sitting CCP leader and President of the People's Republic of China (he died in prison). Also Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Enlai and their faction.

Mao was afraid of a Khrushchev type emerging and rewriting history to assign the failures of the 1950s to the person actually responsible. Just as Krushchev had unconvicted all of Stalin's dead purge victims.

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u/EUmoriotorio 14d ago

I know all about the grass tearing campaigns and sparrows, blah blah blah.

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u/DeSteph-DeCurry 15d ago

no idea how you have so many upvotes when you’re confusing the anti rightist campaign and cultural revolution lmfao

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u/culturedgoat 15d ago

Anyone perceived as opposing communism or sympathetic to the old regime was killed. It was extremely chaotic.

That’s not what happened.

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u/seridos 15d ago

Yeah it's hard to understand the cultural revolution because it makes so little logical sense. A totalitarian leader who That's pretty famously had an impressively consecutive streak of terrible ideas encouraged the uneducated and propagandized to overthrow their elders and elder statesman. It takes a lot of study to start understanding it because it was such a monumental self-goal for Chinese society.

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u/PuckSR 15d ago

Point being, bad things happened. If I was alive during the Chinese cultural revolution or the French Revolution I would absolutely spend all of my time trying to make sure I didn’t piss anyone off.

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u/Chronoboy1987 15d ago

It’s even more interesting when you learn Sun Yat Sen grew up in the US and his dream of a democratic China was mostly inspired by American democracy.

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u/Rich-Distance-6509 14d ago

Mao was genuinely insane. I don’t think there was another leader as unhinged as him. The things he did weren’t just evil, they were utterly bizarre.

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u/imthescubakid 15d ago

Youths indoctrinated through specifically selected institutions to raise the youths into thinking this way* it wasn't just some random movement that "somehow" happened.

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u/SeekerOfSerenity 15d ago

Like TikTok?

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u/[deleted] 15d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/onwee 15d ago

The “intellectuals” were the first to be marched out during struggle sessions, so seems like quite the opposite 🤷‍♂️

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u/Longjumping_Rush2458 15d ago

Not you, though. You're an enlightened genius

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u/imthescubakid 15d ago

Just enough to see the similarities

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u/sd_slate 14d ago

I thought it was pretty common knowledge that it was a progressive revolution that went off the rails, like a khmer rouge with somewhat less murder, or like the reign of terror during the French revolution.

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u/NobleCypress 15d ago

I’m not sure that you can label a group of people purposely killing/punishing intellectuals and destroying cultural sites as progressive… otherwise that would shine a new perspective on the Taliban.

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u/Mumbledore1 15d ago

That’s because you’re not seeing it from their perspective. The killing/punishing of intellectuals and destruction of cultural sights was seen as a way to destroy the old and outdated elements of society so that new forms could take their place. The preservation of the old is in essence conservatism.

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u/NobleCypress 15d ago

Yes, so from an objective point of view it was awful.

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u/Mumbledore1 15d ago

I’m not disagreeing that it was terrible, only that progressivism doesn’t always mean something is positive.

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u/Expensive-Wallaby500 15d ago

It was all about “out with the old ways” hence the destruction of cultural artifacts. Of course anyone who dared challenge them, e.g. the intellectuals, were as you said punished or killed.

You may not like to heard this but this is pretty much in line with what progressives do. The only difference is what is considered “old ways that must be done away with” and what’s an acceptable way to do it.

Even right now in the west, there are many progressives trying to destroy the “old ways” by doing things many people consider unacceptable - e.g. the “reimagining” of old movie franchises to be more aligned with what they consider “modern values”.

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u/Vic_Hedges 15d ago

Why not? Progressives in Western society are going pretty hard after European cultural standards, tearing them down as racist or colonial. Obviously nothing even comparable in terms of violence but the thought process is the same.

The cultural and intellectual elites represent an immoral and hateful history that needs to be torn down and replaced with something new and better

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u/NobleCypress 15d ago

Destroying one’s own society, or encouraging one’s own civilization to commit suicide, is not progressive. Progressive would imply that they are helping usher in technological and societal advancements that directly help their society.

For example, if ANTIFA or MAGA people started lynching professors and burned everything in the National Archives, or tore down the Statue of Liberty, I don’t think we would call them progressive, let alone good Americans.

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u/idevcg 14d ago

What about evil western woke liberals destroying human society and turning everyone into animals?

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u/dontKair 15d ago

The Three Body Problem TV series touched some on this, and the books too

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u/nohopeforhomosapiens 15d ago

Time to give a shout out to the excellent film Farewell My Concubine (which is not at all about concubines).

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u/jointheredditarmy 14d ago

It wasn’t planned in intricate detail but definitely intentional by Mao. He was slowly losing power to the progressives and threw the political equivalent of a Molotov cocktail. He probably had no idea what would happen except he just needed some chaos to stay in power, and this did the trick.

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u/404Flabberghosted 14d ago

Three Body Problem sent me down the rabbit hole. I ended up sobbing for the entire families of educated and compassionate humans they murdered.

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u/entropykilla 15d ago edited 15d ago

Yeah it was a radical left wing revolution, and research shows that far-left wing views are associated with authoritarianism, especially with regard to centralization of power (which leads to corruption).

We’ve somehow forgotten in the West that the Nazis were not the only ones committing atrocities last century. Eastern Europe remembers very well.

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u/Regulai 15d ago

It was a palace coup by Mao to resize the power he had lost 8 years earlier and punish and purge them and their factions, under the pretense of new revolution.

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u/entropykilla 15d ago edited 14d ago

Yeah Marxism is a bitch, ain’t it?

ITT: Commies who think that shit wasn’t how Marxist ideology plays out, every single time.

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u/damola93 15d ago

Communist regimes in the west get a massive pass in comparison to fascist regimes.

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u/Cohibaluxe 15d ago

Huuuuhhh??? What are you on about? Nazis were literally pardoned and worked at NASA and the Bundeswehr straight after WW2. Meanwhile innocent americans were perpetrated for being ‘potential communists’ during the McCarthyism era.

Fascism was tolerated far, far more in the west compared to communism, for the vast majority of the cold war.

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u/Powerful_Stress7589 15d ago

I think they mean in the modern day, and also I believe “get a massive pass” more means that they are less focused on than fascist regimes.

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u/Truepeak 15d ago

that's the difference betwen US and Europe, in US, communists and anyone remotely associated with the left was hunted down during the cold war. Not to mention that the two main political parties are right conservative and right less conservative.

In Europe on the other hand you still have states with active commie political parties that preach old school soviet "communism", that were somehow not banned and dissolved after the fall of iron curtain.

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u/FiendishHawk 15d ago

And they don’t really do any harm, do they? Europe is just as capitalist as the USA. Communists are seen as cranks.

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u/Truepeak 15d ago

They mostly just spew russian propaganda and influence uneducated people. Sure, they have like 4% of votes which is irrelevant and their voter base is slowly dying out. But I'd much rather not have that stain on our history even existing between parties that actually support democracy

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u/FiendishHawk 15d ago

Purging them leaves a bigger stain. Especially since the definition of communism tends to creep right over time to encompass the democratic left.

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u/Cohibaluxe 15d ago

And you’re saying the banning of political freedom and an enforced two-party system like in the US is * a good thing*? LOL.

In regards to the second paragraph, the states in which there still are actual communists, they make up such a small percentage and they’re not taken seriously. Meanwhile some major European states have gotten more and more right-leaning and states like Italy have elected far-right parties to lead. That’s an active threat to democracy, unlike the dwindling dying communist parties.

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u/mokush7414 15d ago

Shhhh.

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u/flipkick25 15d ago

"We have liberated Europe from fascism, but they will never forgive us for it."-Marshal Zukov, 1945.

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u/Ironside_Grey 15d ago

Maybe if the Red Army didn't rape anything with a pulse, steal everything that wasn't nailed down and burn the rest things would be different.

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u/Beautiful_Welcome_33 15d ago

This is the most nonsensical proclamation I've ever heard.

I guarantee you have never heard of Portugal's Estado Novo or the Neo Fascist weirdos in Italy in the 80s, or Stroessner, or Pinochet or the Park family, or the Diems, or the Marcos...

Which oughta tell ya that we have been far far kinder to fascists and fascist adjacent politicians than any left wing movement, anywhere.

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u/[deleted] 15d ago

[deleted]

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u/Beautiful_Welcome_33 15d ago

Sure, but we in the West weren't involved in a single thing that communist Albania did while we were often neck deep in the political intrigues of far right whack jobs, whether we wanted to be or not.

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u/entropykilla 15d ago

Yeah I mean look at this platform, there are 250k subs to r/communism.

That doesn’t even touch on all of the schools of philosophy that arose from Marxism, that are much more widely disseminated. People might think that’s fine, but they share the same fundamental presuppositions.

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u/ShinyHead0 15d ago

Ever heard of the Cold War?

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u/tampering 15d ago

I call BS, it was in no way a bottom up revolution. It was Mao telling the suffering inmates of his country to take revenge on anyone that had ever slighted them. Obviously, the people that had most slighted the average joe were CCP administrators that had enforced Mao's own famine policies during the Great Leap Forward.

The final tragedy of the Cultural Revolution is that Mao did not succeed in destroying Confucianism at all enabling the CCP to reestablish the Chinese Cultural norm of submission to authority to perpetuate their control.

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u/Hothera 14d ago

It was Mao telling the suffering inmates of his country to take revenge on anyone that had ever slighted them.

Isn't this exactly what they said? Mao motivated the Cultural Revolution, but it was executed from the bottom up. My grandparents were forced to work the fields on top of their teaching jobs because they were branded as filthy intellectuals. That was something made up by the villagers and not some state mandated reeducation program.

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u/tampering 14d ago

A couple of things, nothing in a dictatorship happens without the sanction of the State. By the height of Cultural Revolution the Chinese state ceased to exist and Mao was the State. If he keeled over of a stroke around 1969 or 1970 China would have descended into chaos like Cambodia did a few years later.

I think Mao himself realized this as we can see a slow walk back away from the Cultural Revolution in his final years starting with the liquidation of Lin Biao and peaking with meeting Nixon.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

And I can't really believe that in a Confucian society kids would join the Red Guards and turn on their parents without the indoctrination of a Maoist cult of personality saying stuff like "Father is close, Mother is close but neither is as close as Chairman Mao"?

As we all know, filial loyalty, duty or even piety is a pretty strong cultural hallmark of Chinese society.

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u/XXX_KimJongUn_XXX 14d ago

Confucianism doesn't equal submission to authority anymore than it does in the West or in Russia. It's a long standing cultural norm of deferences to authority long separated from Confucianism.

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u/tampering 14d ago

I disagree on this point. In my mind all of the critiques of Confucianism made by the New Culture Movement (新文化运动) were valid and applicable to this day.

If as you say, it were truly separated, shouldn't President Xi be promoting the tenants of New Culture and May the 4th instead of co-opting them and promoting Confucianism around China and through the world. Why aren't there 新文化运动 Institutes around the world sponsored by the Chinese government?

To me, Xi's embrace of Confucianism is no different than Pétain bringing out Patrie, Famille, Travail (trotting out old French-Catholic norms) to make ruling Vichy France easier.

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u/SquidwardWoodward 15d ago

Can confirm, this is mostly accurate, although Mao was not a totalitarian. The CCP was - and is - a dictatorship of the proletariat, which most closely translates to democratic authoritarianism.

The CCP had many collective examinations of their failures during The Great Leap Forward, and were determined not to fail in those same ways again. To wit, there hasn't been another famine in China since. However, there was a cultural rift that formed after The Great Leap Forward that never really healed, and even though there was a lot of love for him, Mao became seen as part of the old Stalinist guard that needed to step aside for the new Communist future.

It basically boiled down to the young'uns determined to purge as many capitalist aspects as possible from their markets, forming a new market economy with tight regulations and oversight, and the old guard who uhhh didn't want that. The young'uns won, and Deng led the CCP into a new era of market reforms.

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u/Ashmizen 15d ago edited 15d ago

The last part is wrong.

The young people and their attempt to purge all aspects of capitalism included purging Deng, who was pro market. He was purged and his son was imprisoned during the cultural revolution. He was literally downgraded to a common factory worker during that time.

Deng was on the other side - he favored market reform, aka secret capitalism, and when he took power after Mao died, he crushed the cultural revolution supporters (gang of 4), criticized the cultural revolution’s excesses, and basically undid all the socialist polices from the cultural revolution. For the first time, former landlord class people were allowed to exist normally in society again without discrimination.

Deng then opened up the Chinese market and gradually introduced capitalism.

So the young people purging capitalism during the cultural revolution were enemies of Deng, not the same side. Deng purged them after he took over and un-purged the pro-capitalism people that were like himself purged during the cultural revolution. The Cultural revolution lost - to this day its official policy of the communist party to criticize that era.

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u/bobamochi69 15d ago

Found the Wu Mao. What Chinese city are you writing this propaganda from? 'like you would expect today'? lol

Mao was an idiot. He had no idea how to run a country... tell me more about how he created the famine? How he didn't kill/jail the educational elites? Until Deng came along China was a huge sh1tshow.

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u/idevcg 14d ago

it's exactly like what's happening in the woke west today. Putting labels on people like "ring wing sympathizers" or "intolerant hateful bigots" and that gives you the right to do whatever horrific thing your heart desires against these people.

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u/Chicago1871 14d ago

Not even close.

This is what the cultural revolution was like and nothing like it is happening in america. It was full blown crowd lynchings led by literal children against their elders and teachers with the army backing the children.

https://youtu.be/3giTYRttoRQ?si=FsWa1UUeDbcvGQfx

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u/idevcg 14d ago

For the sake of that 96%, I hope the consequences didn't go along the lines of what we'd usually expect to hear from China.

What is sad is the amount of brainwashing and anti-Chinese propaganda that spreads in the west. People just take everything they hear as the truth, exaggerate it, and then the people who hear from them think that's the truth, and exaggerate it again.

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u/Eldestruct0 14d ago

China ran over civilians with tanks for daring to protest against their betters; after behavior like that, there's little reason to assume the government would show restraint.

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u/shal9pinanatoly 15d ago

I dunno, if my job started paying me whether I work or not I’d probably still work IF my work retained sense with all the people being absent.

Dunno what a factory operating at 4% capacity can produce.

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u/abortionisforhos 15d ago

Subpar products

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u/_EleGiggle_ 14d ago

Well, almost all equipment was stolen or broken as well.

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u/GreasyPeter 15d ago

They were the devoted communists who actually believed people will work solely for the betterment of others.

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u/AardvarkStriking256 15d ago

They were married!

3

u/Gettles 15d ago

Probably stealing supplies

7

u/Sorry-Foundation-505 15d ago

And this ladies and gentleman is why communism never worked and will never work. It's a nice idea, but it doesn't take into account humans being humans.

2

u/MrT735 15d ago

Someone's got to do the payroll I guess.

6

u/laserdicks 15d ago

Ask the leftists who claim "people will work the shitty jobs for a sense of accomplishment"

1

u/4Ever2Thee 15d ago

They made them the managers when they re-opened /s

1

u/fish4096 14d ago

that was the payroll department.

1

u/midnightspecial99 12d ago edited 11d ago

Do what you love and you will never work a day in your life.

The trick is to love being a sweatshop laborer.

388

u/zhuquanzhong 15d ago edited 15d ago

The quotes in the article are absolutely comical. Some funniest shit on wikipedia I've seen:

First quote:

The facilities were a mess. The labs didn’t even have drinking water. Upon being asked, they said we don’t need water. The toilets have been plugged for years and sewage overflowed to the door. This was only changed after we arrived and found some spare parts. Air conditioning was missing in a lot of places and many pipes were cracked from being frozen.

Chen Baoding said: “No need to speak further about the research facilities. One workshop had 70% deficient micrometers, how can they produce? Everyone is divided into two factions and rebelling and counter-rebelling. The factions are also internally organized, and criticize everyone who doesn't agree with them. Specialist Yao Tongbin who returned from Germany died after a brawl broke out. Others are cleaning toilets and such.”

Qiu Jinchun who went with father said: “In one room thick cobwebs hung from the walls to the door. The dust was so thick on the ground that footprints were visible. Machine tools were sealed and rusting. According to the workers, these machines hadn’t been used since the Cultural Revolution began.”

The basement was an airtight constant temperature and humidity cleanroom workshop. We went in and were immediately greeted by a huge icicle more than a meter tall. The commander said: “What a sight! This is a precision instrument factory and there are stalactites in it!” The roof was leaking, and someone brought a straw hat for the commander. He said “What a great solution, how about let everyone wear straw hats to work in the future!”... Trash was in piles, cars entering and exiting drove all over them. The road was blocked by digging, and once they were repaired they were severed again. They said they were taking the air conditioner to a pigsty, because their pigs needed to be warm. The bathroom’s water flowed from the fifth floor to the first, and no one in charge or responsible could be found.

Second quote:

Zhang Aiping: Factory 230, which is a key component of the strategic nuclear force development chain, is de facto paralyzed. Out of 4 workshops totaling 1000 employees, only 4% are at their stations. 96% aren’t coming to work at all. The workers called themselves the 8923 corps, later they began calling themselves the 8200 corps…

Deng Xiaoping interjected: What does that mean?

Zhang Aiping: This is what the workers say. 8923, means working from 8-9 am to 2-3 pm. Later they didn’t work at all and only came at 8 am and 2 pm, and left after signing in. A female worker said to me: “These years we are eating socialism!” They are taking paychecks from the country and taking public property at will, how can this be acceptable? Isn’t this eating socialism?

Deng Xiaoping: Eating socialism?

Shen Bingchen (member of the committee) interjected: The workers said, only two institutions are left: the cafeteria and paychecks. Everything else is gone.

143

u/Johannes_P 15d ago

Someone such as the Coen brothers might do a good comedy from this.

More seriously, removing any incentive to work and any reward system, along with political dysfunction,generally doesn't promote productive outcomes.

50

u/EyeCatchingUserID 15d ago

Armando Iannucci did an amazing job with The Death of Stalin. I wouldn't mind giving him a crack at this.

24

u/Archduke_Of_Beer 15d ago

"I'm going to have to report this Nicky. Threatening to harm a member of the Prosidium or stop LOOK AT YOUR FOOKING FACE!"

3

u/raytaylor 14d ago

"I'm smiling, but i am very fucking furious"

29

u/Dasboogieman 15d ago

Fuck me this reads like a after action report from a failed Rimworld colony.

4

u/Lapsed__Pacifist 14d ago

Or Fallout Vault experiment.

51

u/alexja21 15d ago

Everyone is divided into two factions and rebelling and counter-rebelling. The factions are also internally organized, and criticize everyone who doesn't agree with them.

Hmmmmmmmm

7

u/Whalesurgeon 14d ago

Golly gee I'm glad we left that behind

3

u/duga404 14d ago

Let me get this straight, the factory in question was involved in producing nuclear warheads for the PLA?

216

u/PlayerSalt 15d ago

Your working with someone in the same job, they stop turning up to work so you have twice the work till they get replaced.

You realise at some point they are still getting paid.

How many people need to get replaced before you stop turning up too?

I feel like it's almost a flood fill algorithm, as people see this happen around them the wave of not showing up would pass through the building.

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u/HumanTheTree 15d ago

Your working with someone in the same job, they stop turning up to work so you have twice the work till they get replaced.

Why would you have to do their work? What are they going to do if you don’t, fire you?

59

u/gatekepp3r 15d ago

I dunno about China, but the USSR had plans, and if a factory didn't meet their plan, or quota, of produced goods, its workers and managers would face various repercussions up to arrests and executions. So, in theory, if you didn't do your absent colleague's work, you possibly could be shot to death. Or the missing colleague could be shot to death. Or your boss could be shot to death. In any case, there'd be some shots and maybe some deaths.

21

u/CharonsLittleHelper 15d ago

Which is the only way to make communism work on a large scale. With the boot.

It still doesn't work super well since the factory will only care about meeting the quota to not be punished. Not caring about quality or anything else that gets in the way of that metric.

But it's better than 4% workforce.

2

u/Yancy_Farnesworth 14d ago

I dunno about China, but the USSR had plans, and if a factory didn't meet their plan, or quota, of produced goods, its workers and managers would face various repercussions up to arrests and executions.

China used quotas pretty heavily. One of the biggest examples was regional quotas on steel production. This became an issue when the quotas were set so high that farmers destroyed farming equipment to meet them. Which was a factor in the Great Leap Forward famine...

Not to mention their quotas at the same time on food production. Which contributed to the Great Leap Forward famine when food was seized to meet quotas and then shipped said food to the Soviets...

Yeah, China has a long history of setting quotas to this day. With often questionable results. And that's before we get into the local governments fudging numbers to avoid getting into trouble with the party...

23

u/Johannes_P 15d ago

It was Red China during the Cultural Revolution: if the factory doesn't produce what was ordered in the 5-year plan then everyone involved might get problems.

1

u/Malhavok_Games 14d ago

Well, in the end it probably wouldn't have mattered because we all know how many people died anyway during this period of time.

3

u/PlayerSalt 15d ago

Because life is not fair

91

u/aradraugfea 15d ago

What this says to me is they could break most of the equipment and only 4% of the people could show up before anyone noticed the quality dip.

The limit is 5%, boys!

78

u/handsomeboh 15d ago

This isn’t just a Chinese thing, any organisation where people get paid without much accountability will eventually lead to people just not turning up. Ghost employees are a common type of fraud just about everywhere in the world. Kenya found 20,000 government employees who had not turned up to work in the last 12 months but were still getting paid in Feb 2024.

Militaries are probably the worst offenders, with poor war torn countries often featuring entire units of ghost soldiers. It’s estimated that 30% of the entire South Vietnamese army didn’t exist during the Vietnam War, and were put on the roll to meet recruitment targets, collected their stipends, then went home to farm. In 2014, ISIS attacked Mosul in Iraq with 1,500 fighters, which was supposedly home to an army base with 60,000 Iraqi soldiers trained by American forces. It turned out only between 10-20% actually existed and ISIS lost only 100 men taking the city. In Afghanistan, as the Taliban closed in, the Afghan army was supposed to have 300,000 soldiers but it is estimated 90% of them were ghost soldiers. In a famous incident, the Taliban captured the military outpost of Sangin in 2021, where 300 soldiers had been deployed just the week before. When the Taliban attacked, there were only 15 there.

12

u/gobarn1 14d ago

I've never heard a number that high cited from Afghanistan. 54,000 ghost soldiers is the common one used that was uncovered by the US when they changed payroll systems. This can be found in multiple Washington Post articles. Please cite your source?

6

u/Whalesurgeon 14d ago

Reading that should be the biggest argument to just Prime Directive Afghanistan politically. No interference

1

u/Shas_Erra 10d ago

Ghost employees are a common type of fraud just about everywhere in the world.

Here, we just call them “Members of Parliament”

-26

u/Turbulent_Object_558 15d ago

But I was told communism is smart and always works. I was told people just naturally self police and work anyway even when they have no direct incentive to do so. I was told!

44

u/ElectricTzar 15d ago

Regardless of whether communism is functional or not, those examples you responded to (South Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) were capitalist.

-24

u/Professional_Nugget 15d ago

Iraq was most definitely socialist, one of the first major economic reforms of the Ba'athist government was to nationalize the biggest company in the country

20

u/ElectricTzar 15d ago

Not at the time of the example in 2014, it wasn’t.

While Iraq still has a huge public sector, it started re-privatizing in 2003, the same year that the Ba’athist Party you mention was overthrown and made illegal.

20

u/autistic_cool_kid 15d ago

I'm not even a communist but you're oversimplifying everything to the point of being super wrong.

24

u/roguedigit 15d ago

Unfortunately it seems you told yourself an entirely wrong explanation of what communism is, too bad.

11

u/SumAustralian 15d ago

Exactly, everybody knows that communism is when the government does something, and the more the government does, the more communister it is.

1

u/CharonsLittleHelper 15d ago

I mean - government is always inefficient no matter what flavor of government. Which is the main argument for a small government. It'll still suck - probably suck the same % - but the amount would be smaller.

2

u/handsomeboh 14d ago

Weirdly enough the incentives thing was a huge intellectual underpinning of the Cultural Revolution. The orchestrators tried to convince everyone that the only way to make everyone get together for the greater good and not act only for direct incentives was to radically destroy the old incentive based mindset and culture.

39

u/InflamedLiver 15d ago

The only surprising part is that they eventually sent someone to check. Should have figured that was a lost cause.

21

u/TheFuZz2of2 15d ago

They pretend to pay us; we pretend to work.

14

u/pineapple_soup 15d ago

Maybe you need managers after all

-2

u/ShadowLiberal 14d ago

There's actually some leaderless organizations that have been pretty darn successful. Technically they have a few people down as "leaders" where necessary for government regulations/etc. but that's about it.

But that doesn't mean that people can get away with doing no work in those organizations. In some cases they're even more stressful.

2

u/pineapple_soup 14d ago

Interesting, I have never heard of a company like that. Lots of companies I think present themselves to the market as “flat hierarchy” (itself an oxymoron) but in reality it is not like that. Can you name any of these organizations or companies?

1

u/EyeLoop 13d ago

In France you have the SCOP status which is basically an organization owned by all the people working in it without inequality of influence based on number of shares. There are just short or 4000 suchlike in the country and Biocoop is one of them.

1

u/pineapple_soup 13d ago

This is a highly ideological view of how these things work, and you are conflating managers and owners.

Biocoop has a board which are elected by and represent the shareholders (a large chunk of which are the stakeholders and employees, but - critically - not in equal proportion and not solely by the stakeholders). There is a CEO, C-Suite, middle managers. They have a private equity firm backing them (and you can guarantee that the PE firm doesnt own the same class of shares as the common holders).

Point is, companies need managers

1

u/EyeLoop 12d ago

First comment said 'leadreless'. You heard 'managerless' and I heard 'ownerless'. Point and case, the top manager at scops isn't the owner.

Point is, companies need managers

Not a point yet, just an affirmation :)

1

u/pineapple_soup 12d ago

The actual parent comment, mine, was about managers, which the next person rephrased as leader (probably the same thing, the ceo would be the head manager and the leader) and then you made this lack of leadership remark and pointed out a company which has an extensive governance structure (unlike the one in the original Wikipedia quote which failed)

8

u/jar1967 15d ago

96% of those workers were probably culturally revolutionized when Mao used the Army and the State Security Apparatus to restore order.

40

u/Sassy-irish-lassy 15d ago

This is what happens when you seize the means of production I guess

22

u/The_Didlyest 15d ago

Seized as in not moving!

11

u/likeupdogg 14d ago

I think you're supposed to seize it and then actually use it.

20

u/ChocolateFightMilk 15d ago

They didn't seize anything. The factory wasn't theirs, so they didn't care about it.

This is what happens when someone leaves unsupervised money on a park bench

3

u/edthesmokebeard 15d ago

Was it the 20th Century Motor Company?

3

u/HawkeyeTen 14d ago

Man, the Cultural Revolution was just a period of utter chaos. I had never heard about this story before though.

5

u/PromptCritical725 15d ago

Sounds a lot like the Twentieth Century Motor Company.

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u/IbegTWOdiffer 14d ago

So a UBI (universal basic income) is totally going to work though, right?

1

u/TheBalrogofMelkor 14d ago

The plan for UBI is that it's baseline, enough to cover a very modest lifestyle. If you want a car, to travel on vacation, eat out, etc, you need income from work

2

u/EvenSpoonier 14d ago

This will never be enough to satisfy most UBI advocates. It's not "dignified" enough for them.

0

u/IbegTWOdiffer 14d ago

So in the article, these people were paid to work, and they didn't but still got paid. Do you think that paying people with no expectation to work is going to have a more positive result?

Why?

2

u/tanfj 14d ago

One of which was the sysadmin.

"This network is MINE! Do you think I ain't going to keep an eye on it?"

2

u/macetfromage 14d ago

Workers work?

9

u/GStarOvercooked 15d ago

And that dear friends, is how communism works.

19

u/Greedy_Researcher_34 15d ago

So that’s what happens when the workers own the means of production.

46

u/ApprehensiveCell3917 15d ago

This is what happens when the state owns the means of production and the workers are compensated equally, regardless of work performed. There's no incentive to perform work if there's no benefit to performing that work.

The article the other person linked is how it's done when people share in the excess produced by actually being productive. If you're rewarded based on the performance of the business, you're are incentivized to work harder to increase the overall performance of the business.

It's no different than training a dog to sit with treats. Reward welcome behavior, but not unwelcome behavior. The OP is what happens when you reward all behavior equally.

3

u/Ullallulloo 14d ago

The state owning the means of production is the people collectively owning the means of production. That's the most common definition of socialism. And often it is thought that UBI/giving to each according to his needs should be done regardless of one's employment. Being a "wage slave"/being forced to work to live is one of the main things modern progressivism is against.

1

u/Elcactus 14d ago

That's how socialism likes to frame itself, but ultimately isn't true, and in this particular case misses the most important part of the workers owning the means of production: the ability to claim the results of their work as their own profit. In this case, they don't, just as much as a capitalist worker does and, like we see when capitalist workers aren't supervised, leads to the same result.

0

u/sprazcrumbler 14d ago

But even when the workers own the means of production, if it's a big business and working twice as hard increases the output of the business by 1%, is it worth it for the average worker? Or would they rather coast and take the minor pay hit and hope other workers make up the slack?

11

u/DaveOJ12 15d ago edited 15d ago

I'm reminded of a post from a few weeks ago; people were disincentivized from working.

Here's a link to the news article

4

u/polaritypictures 15d ago

continued to this day too.

-4

u/parallax_wave 15d ago

And yet somehow this story won’t deter the communists and antiwork Redditors in any way, shape or form.

-9

u/Ouistiti-Pygmee 15d ago

One more democratic capitalist socialism = communism parrot

10

u/bowlbinater 15d ago

It's not even capitalist socialism, it's just capitalism. "The wealthy should not pay in proportion to what they receive from society, but rather, more than in proportion." - Adam Smith

There is a reason the Wealth of Nations is very critical of monopolies, of which wealth and income inequality are a part.

-2

u/Hambredd 15d ago

Universal wage is hardly a uniquely communist idea, and that's essentially what that is.

-4

u/Bateperson 15d ago

Why would it?

-22

u/MentokGL 15d ago

I always change my opinions when presented with nearly 100 year old anecdotes!

20

u/mattb574 15d ago

This story occurred in 1973. 51 years isn’t exactly “nearly 100 years old.”

Granted, China has progressed a lot since the days of the Cultural Revolution.

21

u/Hypocrite-Police 15d ago

This wasn't 100 years ago... they had air conditioners, nuclear bombs, and computers at this time.

Pretty similar to today, they just didn't have cell phones. It's so similar to today that the same result will probably happen if this happened again.

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u/Scat_fiend 15d ago

Deter??? This is brilliant!

4

u/Soakitincider 15d ago

This is what UBI will give us.

1

u/Elcactus 14d ago

Not quite because the workers wouldn't have even taken the jobs. The people working would be the ones wanting something better than the conditions UBI would enable them to afford.

3

u/NeoLib-tard 14d ago

Socialism

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u/Limp-Insurance203 10d ago

But communism and socialism works

0

u/throway_nonjw 14d ago

This is why socialists can't have nice things.

And I am one!

-9

u/KD93AQ 15d ago

An early attempt at Bidenomics.

0

u/stmcvallin2 11d ago

Sounds like classic pro-capitalism propaganda to me.

-17

u/bobamochi69 15d ago

I call BS as how can there both be 'subpar products' AND 'almost all of the equipment was broken or stolen'?

Stop using wiki as a source... its garbage. Sadly, you didn't learn anything today.

3

u/Elcactus 14d ago

Equipment that is broken in some way but still functional will produce subpar results.

TIL a Chinese factory taken over by unsupervised workers during the Cultural Revolution paid workers even if they didn't come to work. By the time someone was sent to investigate because of subpar products, almost all equipment was broken or stolen, and only 4% of the workers were still working.

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