The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou: The Transformation of City and Cadre, 1949-1954 (review)

In this impressive study, James Gao utilizes Chinese archives to revisit the Communist takeover of China's cities after 1949. His findings parallel two earlier studies, Ezra Vogel's Canton under Communism (1969) and Kenneth Lieberthal's Revolution and Tradition in Tientsin (1980), but go far beyond these works. Gao searches for answers to two important questions. First, exactly how did the rural cadres sent into China's major cities establish control over their new urban environment? Second, how was it that the initially moderate urban policies did not dull the revolutionary edge of the Communist movement but rather laid the foundations for a generation of increasingly radical changes under the aegis of Mao Zedong?

The book recounts several factors that have become the staple of history textbooks. Gao describes how the Communist Party leadership realized, as the Guomindang regime collapsed in 1949, that radical policies would further destroy the already moribund urban economy. Consequently, they did everything in their power in 1949 and 1950 to restart urban production, commerce, and administration. He shows again how the Korean War served as the means for the Communist Party to consolidate its control through patriotic anti-Americanism. He recounts how the "Three Anti" and "Five Anti" campaigns were used to attack urban problems as well as cripple the social power of the bourgeoisie.

Yet even in these sections, Gao adds important new insights. He emphasizes how the Communists had learned from the mistakes made when they first captured Guomindang-controlled cities such as Changchun and Shijiazhuang more than a year before the Guomindang rout. He relates how Mao Zedong instructed the Party leadership to learn from the failure of the seventeenth-century rebel Li Zicheng, whose armies occupied Beijing in 1644 but threw away their victory over the Ming dynasty by their looting and denigration of Ming officials. The example of an earlier peasant-led movement that quickly lost control of China to a combination of foreigners (the Manchus) and Chinese armies (Wu Sangui) would not have been lost upon the Communists, who saw themselves fighting against a similar coalition of American and Chinese Nationalist forces. At the end of the book, Gao carefully sets forth how the Communist Party top leadership, Soviet advisors, and Hangzhou leadership redirected the standard policy of industrializing Chinese cities in order to preserve Hangzhou's already well-established character as a resort city.

In the marvelous second chapter, Gao presents a fresh account of how the Communist Party put together several thousand cadres from guerilla bases in southern and central Shandong and sent them to take over Hangzhou. As Gao describes, the new rulers of Hangzhou were peasants with a basic education at best and no knowledge of urban life or city administration. Through discipline, self-confidence born of the wartime experience, and faith in the Communist Party leadership, these transplanted cadres succeeded in a new environment.

This chapter sets the stage for Gao's main thesis. He believes that the key to the Communists' urban success lay in establishing new political rituals around which a new socialist urban culture could be constructed. Citing a study of the ritual function of elections in American politics as his inspiration,¹ Gao writes that the Communists "employed cultural weapons to consolidate the new regime" (p. 3). The three main qualities that Gao finds enabled the Communists to change the existing Chinese urban culture were the opportunism of local cadres, who adapted central directives to prevailing local conditions; the general acceptance of patriarchal leadership; and the spread of various forms of mass meetings (huiyi). Gao emphasizes that these meetings for the purpose of study, criticism, and self-criticism became, along with the state-controlled media, the means that "helped the CCP make its power sacred" (p. 253). These rituals acquired mythic dimensions and permitted the...