Fixing the Huai River: Technology of Labor Formation in Maoist China, 1950–53

Abstract

This article contributes to the large-scale engineering scholarship by revealing the labor practices involved and the state's role in shaping them. It provides a history of labor formation through earthwork technology in China's 1950s Huai River Control Project. The Communist Party's approach to engineering and labor differed from its Nationalist predecessor's. The party mobilized millions of peasants to dig and move an astronomical amount of soil in a few years. This herculean feat was made possible by promoting "work methods" to encourage peasants' self-Taylorization. The campaign aimed to cultivate a habit to work efficiently in mass-scale collaboration under external instructions. Through promoting work methods, state-appointed cadres assumed a tutelage role that allowed them to replace labor foremen. A hierarchical cadre-laborer relationship emerged from the same labor process that changed the nation's landscape.

Introduction

The rains started in late June 1950, eight months after the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The people of the Huai River region—a vast swath of land linked by the Huai and its many tributaries, spanning southern Henan, northern Anhui, northern Jiangsu, and southwestern Shandong provinces—depended on the summer monsoon to relieve the drought and sustain their agricultural livelihoods. But the caprices of the rainy season were unpredictable; too much water could turn relief into a land-engulfing flood. Weeks of torrential rains in 1950 wiped out dikes and swept away entire villages. The rains continued into early August, with a normal year's entire monsoon season falling in forty days. The resulting floods inundated over 6.6 million acres and devastated a population of 13 million.¹

Such disasters were common in the Huai River region where massive floods occurred 130 times in the five centuries before 1950.² The region, about half the size of Germany, was once among the best irrigated and most productive agricultural areas of China. That changed in the late twelfth century when the Yellow River shifted its course and overtook the Huai River. The soil carried down by the Yellow River over the next few centuries filled the riverbed and blocked the Huai's mouth to the ocean.³ From then on, flooding was a constant threat. In 1855, the Yellow River changed course again, leaving the Huai and many of its tributaries elevated and silted. This natural disaster coincided with the Qing dynasty's diminished ability to fund flood control. Floods and droughts, rebellions and banditry thereby plagued the Huai region throughout the late imperial period. The ability to control the river and its population was thus crucial to the stability and legitimacy of any emerging modern Chinese state.⁴ Late Qing reformers and the Nationalist government conducted extensive surveys to draft comprehensive river control plans, but few came to fruition owing to the political and financial weakness of the central governments.

After the 1950 flood, the Communist Party launched the Huai River Control Project (hereafter "Huai River Control," 治淮)—the PRC's first major hydraulic project. The project was designed to showcase the leadership of Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and to demonstrate to the Chinese people and the world that these, at last, were the leaders China had long needed but never had. From 1951 to 1957, the project reshaped a waterscape covering 270,000 km², including nine major reservoirs, five lake conservation projects, and thousands of miles of dikes and irrigation canals across four provinces.⁵ Mao's handwritten slogan "We Must Fix the Huai" (一定要把淮河修好), printed widely on banners, newspapers, and even postage stamps, was the most effective means of propaganda for capturing

Fig 1.

Harnessing the Muscle Power. The 1950s control of the Huai River was the People's Republic of China's first major hydraulic project and served as a testing ground for the new regime's labor and engineering practices. Peasants were mobilized to improve their own labor efficiency by developing precise physical techniques and streamlining work processes. (Source: "Peasant Workers Support the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea by Launching Patriotic Labor Competition on the Huai River," Zhi Huai di yi nian gongcheng tupian ji, Huadong renmin chubanshe, 1952.)

national attention. Less noticed by the public, but still profoundly important, was the project's role as a pioneer and testing ground for the new regime's distinctive labor and engineering practices. These practices—constituting a "technology of labor formation"—would inform the PRC's many and even more massive infrastructure projects to come (see figure 1).

Large hydraulic infrastructure systems are an important "place of power" in the words of historian Chandra Mukerji, demonstrating the state's "material intelligence and stewardship over nature."⁶ But an infrastructure's centrality to the exercise of state power begins before it is used. As Mukerji describes in the construction of France's Canal du Midi, the state extends its claim to legitimacy and asserts its dominance through labor and technological processes during the construction process. In the Chinese case, the CCP quickly eliminated its political and military opponents after the 1949 takeover. It consolidated power in the Huai region not only through sweeping land reform and the ruthless campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries but, more importantly, by directing millions of peasants into the Huai River Control earthworks and implementing radically new labor programs to transform them into socialist subjects.

Earthworks in the 1950s Huai River Control involved the digging and moving of an astronomical amount of earth by millions of peasant workers. It was remarkably "modern" by Chinese standards, with its many concrete dams and steel river gates. These modern components required a speed and scale of earthwork unprecedented in the history of Chinese river control. Digging, grading, and piling to prepare the ground for construction went hand in hand with more traditional earthwork such as dredging and embankment construction. The centrality of earthwork extended to all kinds of infrastructure construction in Maoist China, when earthworks large and small relied on peasant labor. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), peasants completed earthwork and stonework equivalent to forty to two hundred Panama Canals every year—digging reservoirs, building roads, and flattening mountains into terrace farmland.⁷

This study focuses on the technical, social, and political construction at the Huai River that shaped the earthwork labor process and made such labor achievements possible. As sociologist Michael Burawoy reminds us, labor processes produce not only material products and social relations but also a lived experience in which ideology is rooted.⁸ The labor process prescribed by the CCP inculcated a new ideology through bodily experience. At the center of the state's efforts to instill new working habits in laborers was the "work methods" (工作法) campaign, which intensively regulated the bodies and minds of the peasants.⁹ The socialist state, rather than organized capital or the labor market, transformed the peasant labor force that socialist and post-socialist China relied on for its modernization.

Work methods were codified labor practices, particularly skills involving individual and collective body movements in unmechanized conditions, through Taylorist time-motion studies conducted by cadres.¹⁰ Drawing on Soviet Taylorism and Stakhanovism, the work methods campaign promoted self-Taylorization among peasant workers and urged their "internalization of continuous success and efficiency."¹¹ It aimed to generate productive enthusiasm through work competitions and catalyze peasants' subjective identification with the productive agenda.¹² The CCP tailored the campaign to China's economic and technological conditions. Unlike other global Taylorization efforts aimed at industrial workers, this ambitious new program was implemented with millions of peasants, who later returned to farming. The CCP relied on its most trusted tool of social mobilization: the mass campaign.¹³ Insisting on rationalizing the labor process under the principle of the Maoist mass line, the program credited peasants, not upper-level experts, with inventing more efficient physical practices and work processes. In preparing for rural collectivization, moreover, CCP leaders emphasized team coordination and cooperation rather than the individual achievements of work models.¹⁴ Relying on neither the traditional foremen nor scientific managers, the CCP empowered revolutionary cadres to organize and agitate the masses. The introduction of cadres into the labor process created a class of "socialist managers" indispensable for the Maoist production regime.¹⁵

New Leaders, New Plan

During the century before 1950, there were many attempts to solve the Huai River problem. Prominent late Qing statesman Zeng Guofan established a commission to regulate the Huai River in 1867 after the Yellow River changed course.¹⁶ Toward the end of the Qing era, industrialist and modernization official Zhang Jian proposed comprehensive flood control of the entire Huai water system.¹⁷ And after the establishment of the Nanjing government in 1928, the Nationalists unfolded their plan, which focused on improving the connectivity and navigability of the Huai River system, without building reservoirs from scratch.¹⁸

A major Republican Huai project took place in 1932, led by engineer Wanghu Zhen (Wanghu is a rare two-character surname). Trained in civil engineering at Cornell University, Wanghu headed the North Anhui Commission for Huai River Control after a major flood the previous year. In A Record of the Huai River Control Work-Relief Project in Anhui (hereafter Record), Wanghu and his colleagues documented the various challenges they faced.¹⁹ First, the commission was vulnerable to the interference of local powers who resisted the planned river work where it cost them land or harvest. In the town of Guzhen, landowners even mobilized the local secret society militia, the Red Spears, to beat up Wanghu's staff. As a result, all construction in Guzhen had to be suspended. Another challenge came from the difficulty in maintaining the right number of workers. As in imperial times, the Republican effort used a "labor-in-exchange-for-relief" (以工代 赈) method, recruiting many local peasants to work on banking and dredging, paying them in grain instead of giving out free relief.²⁰ District chiefs took charge of labor recruitment and management. The engineers, although having requested specific numbers of workers from each district, had little control over how many peasants eventually worked on-site. This resulted in an overabundance of peasant laborers at the beginning of the project and a rapid decline later when they returned to farming, as the prospect of a good harvest diminished peasants' interest in the backbreaking river work. The commission had to raise the relief grain quota to avoid a total shutdown. The lack of a disciplined, readily available labor force made it difficult to complete the work on time.²¹

Fig 2.

Technocratic Problem Solving. In the absence of direct or effective control over peasant labor, the Republican project relied on engineers to speed up the work pace. This dredging work plan from the 1930s Huai River Control serves as an example of how Republican engineers rationalized procedures to increase labor productivity. Instead of relying on labor intensification, they used engineering techniques to ensure completion of the work. (Source: Wanhuai Gongzhen Jishi, 43.)

Engineers were thus left to their own devices to speed up the work pace. The focus was on how they could rationalize the work procedure, rather than how peasants should rationalize their bodily movements. One example comes from the way they dredged the river. The usual method is to open a new riverbed next to the old one and then remove the narrow ridge between the new and the old riverbeds. But excavating layer after layer of soil proved problematic—the water soon rose and filled the entire pit. Engineers worked to redesign the procedure section by section (see figure 2). As shown in figure 2, soil was removed from section A on the first day, from sections B and B' on the second day, and from sections C and C' on the third day. The goal was to reduce the bottom area of the pit, where a surge of water could slow the dredging, while maintaining the progress of earthwork volume. The new procedure effectively lessened labor hardship and increased efficiency. Examples like this abound in the Record. They show that for the engineers intensification of labor was not a feasible solution to improve productivity. Supervisors did conduct a time-motion study, but it was to understand the changed working conditions in order to redistribute labor. They set the soil transport distance at 200 meters and the team at twenty-five people and then recorded the average time for digging, walking with the loaded basket, dumping, and walking back. The study concludes that since this distance was four times longer than the project's average, two more haulers and two fewer diggers were needed. There was no suggestion of increasing the pace of work by altering workers' physical movements, nor a request on workers to find ways to improve efficiency.²² The Record shows that Nationalist engineers approached labor with paternalism and technology with professionalism.²³ Their centrally planned engineering efforts were often frustrated by the autonomy of local interests.

The Huai Control of the 1930s, in other words, shows that the political conditions for the transformation of labor did not exist before the PRC. Chinese modernizers had long embraced the ideology of productivism to save the nation through economic strengthening.²⁴ Janet Chen points out that labor in the service of the nation-state became "one of defining attributes of social membership" in the early twentieth century, when vagrants and beggars were sent to workhouses for redemption.²⁵ However, efforts to improve the labor efficiency of the general population were very limited and often interrupted by political turmoil. Rural reform experiments led by Republican intellectuals and social scientists focused heavily on education, building schools and libraries, not preparing people to work on ditches and roads.²⁶ In treaty-port factories, foremen, instead of scientific managers, controlled the labor force and by extension the labor process.²⁷ During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), Nationalist and Japanese-controlled governments mobilized millions of peasants. But the extremely coercive wartime practices prevented the systematic organization needed for the "scientific management" of peasant labor.²⁸ Nationalist engineers in state-owned factories attempted Taylorist management but faced increasing alienation, indicating a failure to align workers' minds with the regime's agenda.²⁹ The Communist Party experimented with Soviet-style labor competitions for its production campaign in Yan'an.³⁰ The wartime experience with labor mobilization informed the CCP's much larger campaigns after it took power. Control of the Huai River was the CCP's first opportunity to apply this experience to millions of Chinese peasants.

When the Huai River began to flood in the summer of 1950, the Communist government was already burdened with myriad social, economic, and military tasks. Decades of war had devastated the economy, and much of the newly liberated country was embroiled in bloody class struggles over land reform. Skirmishes with remaining nationalist forces, militias, and bandits broke out across the country. While the People's Liberation Army was still conducting a "bandit-suppression" campaign in Southwest China, the Korean War added to the security pressures.³¹ Domestic instability was acute in Huai. A hostile environment and the long neglect of its hydraulic system had fostered local "aggressive survival strategies"—a tradition of organized violence that fiercely resisted state encroachment.³² The Nian Rebellion had raged for nearly two decades beginning in the 1850s, and organized militias like the Red Spears continued to engage in armed confrontations with various state actors. The 1950 Mengcheng Incident demonstrated the persistence of secret societies' resistance into the PRC. During the widespread flooding, local cadres in Nanxiang District, Mengcheng County, arrested villagers for refusing to pay grain taxes. This provoked a riot led by local anti-Communist militias. The peasants broke into the government office, killed the district chief, and burned the building to the ground. Many lower-ranking Communist security personnel—former secret society militiamen—joined the peasant ranks. A small army of two thousand soon occupied the government compound and then reached out to former militias in southern Shandong to foment a transprovincial rebellion. The uprising lasted for another month, before it was crushed by the army.³³

In the midst of this turmoil, the central government decided to "fix the Huai River."³⁴ Not only the unruly floodplains but also the rebellious population threatened security. The Huai Control of the early 1950s thus resembled the urgency of the CCP military campaigns. It penetrated local logistical support networks before drawing up detailed engineering plans. This military approach became a hallmark of Communist Party governance.³⁵

The same military characteristic was present in the Huai River Control Committee, led by CCP's most battle-hardened revolutionaries. Zeng Shan, leader of the former Jiangxi Soviet in the 1920s, took over as chair. His associates Zeng Xisheng, Wu Zhipu, Liu Chongguang, and Hui Yuyu were all former military leaders turned top leaders of their home provinces in the Huai region. Committee Secretary Wu Jue, who oversaw day-to-day operations, had cut his teeth as a commander of the CCP guerilla forces in northern Jiangsu. Among the committee's leadership, Wanghu Zhen and twenty-seven-year-old Communist hydrologist Qian Zhengying were the only two engineers.³⁶ Wanghu's experience at northern Anhui made him uniquely qualified to head the project's engineering department.³⁷ Qian, a rising star in Chinese hydrology who later became minister of water resources in 1979, served as Wanghu's associate.³⁸ The committee's composition reflected the young PRC's dual prerogatives: first, to mobilize the millions of peasants in support of its political and social agendas; and only second, to control the Huai River through technical engineering.

From the outset, the Communists' approach clearly differed from that of late Qing and Republican planners, who emphasized the release of Huai water to prevent mid- and downstream flooding. Following the advice of Soviet hydraulic expert Comrade Bukov, the new plan prioritized "storing the flood" (蓄洪) upstream and midstream in large reservoirs.³⁹ These would be built at the same time as dredging the midstream and expanding the downstream agricultural irrigation network. This radical shift in strategy was designed to capture the future economic benefits of hydropower and irrigation.⁴⁰ As Bukov explained to his Chinese comrades, "Water is considered national wealth by the Soviet people. We should never let any drop of water flow to the sea before making full use of it."⁴¹ For a new regime facing a severe shortage of resources, this seemed eminently reasonable (see figure 3).⁴²

In the first year of the project from winter 1950 to summer 1951, the committee did not even set a fixed recruitment target, but it sought to recruit as many able-bodied men as possible, along with a good proportion of young women.⁴³ They claimed to employ the same traditional "labor-in-exchange-for-relief" approach: peasants would be paid in grain according to the amount of earthwork they did. But if this approach meant "voluntary participation on a noncustodial basis" in imperial China, it was much more tightly controlled and meticulously organized under the CCP.⁴⁴ Concerned about national stability, the central government took steps to stop the disaster from spreading from the region. Army units from the East China and Central-South Military Districts surrounded the worst-hit areas to prevent refugees from fleeing.⁴⁵ More than two million starving peasants were recruited in the first year.⁴⁶ The physical exertion and poor sanitary conditions on the hastily prepared construction sites led to high mortality.⁴⁷ This prompted the committee to rethink its labor practices.⁴⁸

Mobilizing labor proved more difficult in the second and third years. A bumper harvest in 1951 relieved farmers desperate for the grain they had earned from river work. In the fall of 1952, heavy rains again flooded farmland. Villagers pleaded to stay home to restore their fields rather than

Fig 3.

Priority Shift in Hydraulic Development. The 1930s Nationalist government's plan for Huai River Control (top) emphasized channeling the Huai River and its major tributaries to the Yangtze River and the sea. In contrast, the 1950s Communist government's plan (bottom) shifted the priority to "storing the flood" upstream and midstream by building a series of large reservoirs. Unlike the earlier plan, the new approach no longer considered diverting the Huai's waters to the ocean. This change, influenced in part by a post-TVA global trend to build hydropower capacity, also reflected the Communist Party's reliance on Soviet technical advice, which shaped a heavy-handed approach to reservoir construction. (Sources: top, Daohuai Gongcheng Jihua Gaiyao; bottom, Zhihuai diyinian gongcheng tupian ji, 1951.)

be sent to distant construction sites.⁴⁹ To overcome the growing resistance to river work, the CCP relied on agricultural collectivization and intensive grassroots mobilization. Across the country, the CCP promoted mutual aid, whereby several households pooled their labor and tools and shared the harvest. The mutual aid team in the Huai region was the most important mobilization tool.⁵⁰ The new form of collective production drove peasants to work the rivers by promising them that the remaining team members would take care of their land.⁵¹ Mostly women ended up doing the farming and the backbreaking work of maintaining local irrigation systems.⁵²

The committee insisted that mobilization penetrate deep into the lowest level of rural organization: not merely the village but the subvillage team. The recruitment target for the second and third years was set at 10 percent of the village population or 60 percent of the able-bodied labor force. This is noteworthy because the quota was based not on how many workers were needed to control the Huai but on the upper limit of the labor force that the villages could theoretically spare. The focus on able-bodied labor—that is, men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five—and such a high percentage of conscripts proved detrimental to agricultural production.⁵³ Nevertheless, the policy was conducive to rapid completion of the river work. The Huai Control authority could now harness the strength of millions of bodies into the single task of digging and moving soil.

Ultimately, more than two million peasants were conscripted for the Huai River Control in both the second and third years. They were bid farewell by their relatives and neighbors in a cadre-arranged "warm farewell ceremony" and left their villages in teams. They joined men from their district to form a brigade, and then with other brigades from the same county to form a division. They marched along designated routes, under the watchful eye of Liberation Army soldiers, arriving at the river in a brisk, wintry wind.

Self-Taylorization and Work Methods on the Huai

The scale of earthwork completed on the Huai River was astonishing. Two years into the project, the authority recorded the Huai Control accomplishment with pride:

In 1952, the project mobilized 2,272,958 peasant-workers and 22,690 technical workers. 195,731,000 cubic-meters of soil were manually excavated, and 600,000 cubic-meters of river mud were dredged with motorized boats. 172 kilometers of new waterways were constructed, and 963 kilometers old waterways were dredged. The project finished building 6 reservoirs, 5 lake retaining works and 22 floodgates. The total soil excavated … amounted to 400 million cubic meters. If we were to [use this soil to] build a dam with dimensions of one meter in width and one meter in height, its length would exactly span the distance between the Earth and the Moon (see figure 4).⁵⁴

This impressive work was not simply done through coercion. The CCP strived to fix the Huai River while winning the heart of the Huai people. It would not be possible without a drastically new system to organize the starving peasants into a disciplined labor force and mobilize them to work hard with little material incentives. The work methods campaign helped to achieve both the productive and the political goals. Lauding work methods as laborers' innovations, the CCP demonstrated that voluntarily intensifying and rationalizing one's labor process would be rewarded with recognition and status. Model work methods were carefully formulated to encourage discipline, team collaboration, and working with quantified goals—habits that were not normally cultivated in household farming. Moreover, work methods, by codifying embodied skills into pedagogical tools, allowed cadres to play the role of instructors in their direct interaction with peasant workers. The state authority could directly lead the peasants without the interference of the foremen. A new labor regime came into being through experimenting with work methods.

The following sections draw materials from the journal Zhi Huai (治淮), published by the Huai Control Committee and distributed among the tens of thousands of cadres and Communist Party and Youth League members working on the project. The journal aimed to motivate cadres by informing them about the project's progress, discussing the major challenges, and providing instructions on how to overcome them. Topics ranged from the highly technical, such as "how to measure and calculate the earthwork volume when the pit is of an irregular shape" and reports on achievements and "problems" with the myriad logistical and engineering tasks, to the more propagandistic, such as speeches by leaders and labor models. With cadres as both the content providers and readers, the journal could be seen as a management monthly with a particular political bent. Its choice of topics revealed the priorities of cadres and the details of their daily work. The reports on problems and failures were much more candid than in the public media. The journal did not give firsthand accounts of the experiences of peasant laborers, and the

Fig 4.

The Sea of People. Scenes of mass labor captured in photographs played a crucial role as aesthetic tools for socialist subject making. Through political campaigns and agriculture collectivization, the Communist Party successfully mobilized peasant labor on a scale unparalleled by its Nationalist predecessor. Images such as these not only attest to the Party's mobilizing power but also showcase the voluntary devotion of the "masses" to the cause of socialist construction. (Source: "Ten Thousand Earthworkers Moving Orderly to Transport Soil to the Center of the River," Zhi Huai di yi nian gongcheng tupian ji, Huadong renmin chubanshe, 1952.)

articles took on a formulaic, self-celebratory tone in describing the project's accomplishments, large and small. Nevertheless, the journal is remarkably illuminating for understanding how the state constructed a technological system to increase productivity and shape a new labor force.

The methodology of the system was based on formulating and promoting "work methods." Often attributed to a peasant worker or team, work methods were designed to overcome difficulties and increase the efficiency of a particular operation. Examples of methods included "crisscross digging," "tiger-tail soil cutting," "subgrouping sand-transporting," and so on. In fact, the list of colorfully named work methods is nearly endless.⁵⁵ These methods intensified the labor process and enforced a compulsory work rhythm. The campaign urged peasants to think carefully about their work, to cultivate the most exact body-to-tool coordination and body-to-body cooperation, and to be ready to share and eager to learn.

The centerpiece of the Huai River earthwork methods was purportedly created by the Zhu Huaishun Team (ZHT), led by a young peasant named Zhu Huaishun. Other methods were often described as enthusiastic responses to the ZHT work method and presented as evidence that peasant creativity had been widely stimulated. In fact, the impressive variety of work methods was largely a product of the official propaganda discourse. But this discourse had a real impact on the project's construction. The ZHT work method was introduced to all the construction sites along the river through articles, printed pamphlets, oral testimonies, and physical demonstrations. These dissemination efforts brought about a methodization of earthwork that the state hoped would not only increase labor productivity but also reform the minds and bodies of the peasant workers.

In April 1952, the committee sent a group consisting of representatives from the Engineering and Political Departments, the Youth League, and cadres from Anhui Huaiyuan County, as well as a reporter from the Liberation Daily, the main party mouthpiece in eastern China, to the site of the ZHT. After seven days of close observation and research, the group penned an article titled "Summary of the Work Methods of the Huai-Control Peasant-Worker Zhu Huaishun Team" and published it in all the Huai Control media. The introduction to the "Summary" included the committee's directive:

The ZHT Work Methods are the correct methods, and Huai River Control Authorities at all levels should vigorously promote them. … This effort will result in the emergence of more model workers, exemplary work units, and progressive work methods. Our promotion of the ZHT work methods must be deeply integrated with the political education of cadres, workers and peasant-workers. This approach aims to overcome the conservative ideas and complacency among certain individuals within the masses.⁵⁶

The article emphasized the correct class background of Zhu Huaishun and his team. The twenty men were mostly poor peasants, and Zhu was a Youth League member. The tools they brought from home included three shovels, three spades, a rake, eighteen carrying poles, sixteen baskets, and twelve rope nets. According to the "Summary," since adopting the new work methods, the same men with the same tools had doubled their average daily earthwork output from 0.94 to 1.82 cubic meters per person, even as working conditions became more challenging. The article reported, "The distance of transport remains the same [120 meters], the content is more difficult to load and transport [formerly yellow and white sandy soil, later sticky, black gumbo soil], and the slope is steeper."⁵⁷ Throughout the "Summary," quantifications of labor efficiency are accompanied by detailed notes on transportation distance, soil properties, and slope of transport routes. This allows the "Summary" to not only prove the authenticity and adaptability of the method to Huai River working conditions but also transform workers' physical practices into a set of transferable technologies.

Indeed, the ZHT work method focused on calibrating body techniques precisely to the task at hand. Zhu and his team reportedly analyzed the soil characteristics at their worksites, created seven categories, and developed different techniques accordingly. For example, when digging in "moist sandy soil with small amounts of mud," the technique was to first insert the shovel vertically, then stick the shovel in obliquely from the side and lift a wedge-shaped chunk of soil, and then place it steadily in the basket and avoid dripping mud. For "silty-sandy layered soil," the technique was to lift a large chunk with the rake and then place it in the basket by hand. The shovel was not suitable because it could break the soil into small pieces, making loading difficult. Here "using the rake is 30% more efficient than using the shovel."⁵⁸ This is a description of self-Taylorization of work. No longer dependent on improvisation, the team observed, categorized, and established protocols just as a manager would.

Streamlining the production was key. "It is said that 'there is no such thing as a light load for a long journey,'" the "Summary" claims, "but that's no longer true for Zhu's team."⁵⁹ They created an extremely efficient way of transferring the load with an intricate and precise choreography: a pair of workers carrying empty baskets met another pair with loaded baskets in the middle of the route. The first pair lifted the light pole over their shoulders and then turned their bodies around so that the two poles met. They then moved their shoulders under the loaded pole. At the same time, the second pair grasped the light pole, preventing the baskets from touching the ground. Each pair then proceeded to the direction they came from with exchanged baskets. "Observation shows that with this method it takes only two seconds to complete the relay, four seconds faster than using the previous method."⁶⁰ By streamlining the relay process, the team increased efficiency and reduced effort. This was a key objective of scientific management.

The ZHT's most important contribution, however, was to reduce unproductive labor by reassigning tasks. Previously, fourteen men were assigned to carry the soil, four men were assigned to load the baskets, and two stayed behind to cook for the team. Once every five days, two men were released from earthwork to fetch grain and buy necessities at the nearby market. "In sum, the labor used for cooking, grain fetching and shopping—the unproductive labor—took 13% of the labor of the entire team." After careful calculation, they reduced unproductive labor to a minimum by assigning sixteen men to carry and three to load. One person cooked for the entire team. Every five days, one gong (a standard day's work for an adult man) was set aside for fetching grain. Every twenty days, half a day's work was devoted to shopping. "The miscellaneous labor was reduced from 13% to 6%, and the work efficiency was increased by 14%."⁶¹ Here are peasants willingly reducing the necessary labor time for the reproduction of labor power in order to maximize the surplus labor time for the state's primitive capital accumulation.

Alexei Gastev, the most prominent follower of Fred Taylor in the Soviet Union and the founder of Soviet Taylorism, believed that the ideal worker should possess "a taste for work … a constant posture of awareness, attentiveness and alertness," as well as the habit of "careful preparation of tools, timing, order of tasks, and organization of workspace."⁶² The ZHT, as described by its cadre promoters, demonstrated all these traits in its daily work. But what distinguishes the CCP's campaign is that it took Gastev's ideal worker out of the futuristic, industrial space and put him in a muddy river with a carrying pole on his shoulder. The Maoist guiding principle of social mobilization—the "mass line" (qunzhong luxian 群众路线)—played a crucial role in the CCP's approach to labor engagement. The earthworkers who dug canals and dredged rivers around the world were often treated as unskilled and disposable muscle power. Their working conditions depended on the supply and demand of labor.⁶³ Now presented as perfectly capable of planning, designing, and improving their work, they became an essential variable in the technological system—so much so that the state directed its concentrated effort into motivating them to pursue higher efficiency.

The Coproduction of Cadre and Labor

The ZHT work method was a product of the concerted efforts of both the team and the cadres who "summarized" it. The "Summary" obscures where embodied knowledge and daily improvisation of the peasant workers end and where the coaching and codification of the cadres begin. Whether all the ZHT work methods were authentic innovations of the team was beside the point; the goal was to establish the ideal type of self-Taylorism that would inspire and mobilize the millions. The value of the ZHT work method, according to the "Summary," was not only in saving labor power and increasing labor efficiency but also in providing "solid content" to labor mobilization efforts. Without practical content, the labor competition campaigns either generated more buzz than results or simply overexerted workers. More importantly, the ZHT work method gave the cadres a stronger foothold among the peasant workers. Cadres "no longer feel that there is not much for them to do other than encouraging the peasant workers to 'jiayou' [step on the gas]. Instead they are busy with summarizing and promoting advanced practice and examining the results of the competitions." Cadres from all levels of the organization were now "able to enter deeply into the base-level labor units, to understand the key points of the work, to promote and study advanced practices and work methods, and to improve and elevate the level of technology by giving timely work instructions."⁶⁴ Although named after a peasant worker, the ZHT work method was squarely in the hands of cadres. It provided knowledge they would not normally have or had less of than the peasants they were supposed to lead.

Ultimately, the work methods empowered the cadres more than the peasant. This new power relationship was reinforced by linguistic strategies that mobilized the representational power of numbers and mnemonic rhymes. The rhetorical obsession with numbers figured prominently in the everyday bureaucratic and propaganda work of the planned economy. At the macrolevel, it was part of the statistical practice, perhaps even aesthetic, on which the PRC insisted. At the microlevel, it sanctioned the authority of cadres by granting them the exclusive right to transform knowledge into statistical "facts."⁶⁵ Understanding soil properties and creating choreographies for soil transport certainly belonged to the peasants. But the value of peasant knowledge was recognized only after the state verified it through the group of officials' observations and calculations. These officials had the power to evaluate the efficiency of the workers' operations and place them in a narrative of measurable steps in the larger construction project. One example was the categorization of seven techniques corresponding to seven types of soil. The body movements were originally the laborers' improvisation based on their physical experience with the soil. Yet through disembodied measurements such as seconds, percentages, and degrees, as well as categorization and codification, the cadres translated them into planned motions suitable for pedagogical purposes. In the process, the peasant workers were also trained to evaluate their own work using these terms.

The mnemonic rhymes were terse and simple, ostensibly assuming an earthy style of speech. However, the sheer number of rhymes and their similarity to mobilization slogans show that the cadres were the authors and main users. One rhyme describing physical movement reads, "挖淌沙 /下锹轻 /向前推 /端锹不猛" (To dig the flowing sand /shovel it with a light hand /straight forward, give it a shove /with a sturdy grip hoist it up).⁶⁶ In the early days, Chinese workers used chants and mnemonic rhymes with minimal lyrics but full of exclamations to synchronize body movements. When words were used, they gave immediate direction to specific movements.⁶⁷ The above rhymes seemed overly didactic and lacked immediacy, resembling more mnemonic rhymes in traditional Chinese business manuals than workmen's chants. They were pedagogical devices that allowed cadres to assume the role of teacher in their interaction with peasant workers, as they led them in labor competitions.

The use of work methods enabled the authority to develop a new labor management system led by faithful cadres instead of traditional foremen or trained engineers. The CCP used the Huai Control Project as a cadre training boot camp, as evidenced by the large number of cadres who were immediately dispatched to other parts of China in 1951. In 1952, 40,000 cadres, mostly new recruits, worked on the Huai River.⁶⁸ Kenneth Lieberthal shows that it was painfully difficult to remove the foremen's "feudal" control of labor in cities like Tianjin, where the timely completion of construction projects

Fig 5.

"Do-It-Yourself" Technologies. Faced with a lack of professionally trained personnel and ready-made instruments, the 1950s Huai River Control Project instructed cadres to make simple devices for managerial tasks. This "wage calculation board" was designed for cadres unfamiliar with the abacus, a common Chinese calculator, to efficiently calculate earthwork wages. It is especially inexpensive, requiring only cardboard, scissors, a pin, a ruler, and a pen to make. (Source: "Tufang gongzi jisuan pan de jieshao" (Introduction to earthwork wage computing board), Zhi Huai 9 (1952): 17.)

relied on the foremen, who knew how to make peasants do nonagricultural work.⁶⁹ With the work methods campaign, the Huai Control authority tried to make part of foremen's knowledge available to cadres. Replacing foremen with cadres had profound implications: not only did it save time and money for the authority by cutting negotiations, but more importantly, it made it possible to weaken the primacy of peasants' community-based identity and open them to embracing the new socialist subjectivity.

Innovation on the Huai River

The CCP's "choices of techniques," including the promotion of earthwork methods, were based on the harsh reality of the poor endowment in both industrial equipment and technical expertise. Unlike the 1930s project in which Wanghu led small but well-trained teams of earthwork managers, the massive scale of the 1950s project meant that most technical workers and management cadres now had little knowledge of the work before coming to Huai River. Their training was on the job, and they soon taught others what they had just learned. They also relied on textbooks and materials handed down from the Republican era, but made more accessible to those with minimal technical literacy. They were also taught to make do-it-yourself devices to overcome the extreme scarcity of necessary equipment. Such technical heuristics and improvisations became important components of the Huai Control technological system.

Shoufang 收方 (earthwork volume verification) was both a technical and a managerial task. Without accurate measurement, earthwork projects would be in disarray. They would not be able to meet the project's engineering goals or make proper payments to workers. In 1952 and 1953, five issues of Zhi Huai published articles on shoufang. Most explained how to calculate volume of earth and the price of labor when basic formulas did not apply. In previous centuries, Europe and its colonies had developed innumerable methods for calculating earthwork.⁷⁰ The methods employed in America's Tennessee Valley Authority projects had directly influenced Chinese civil engineers in the early twentieth century.⁷¹ Unlike their Nationalist predecessors, who relied on a small but well-trained cadre of professionals, the CCP pushed forward with its army of cadres. The innovations this system required were "adaptors" that could bridge the gap between the low supply of technical skills and the high demand for workloads. These included self-help devices assembled in situ to simplify calculations and reduce the risk of error.

The article "Straightening-the-Corner Graphic Method for Earthwork Volume Calculation" introduces a simple way to calculate the work volume in river dredging. The author states that those new to the job did not know that when opening a new riverbed it is essential to regulate soil removal in a way that allows accurate measurement and calculation. Although the final shape of the riverbed cross section was a wide "V," the two diagonal lines were not straightened until the final stage. The work had to be done in layers, as if building stairs on both sides. Each layer was narrower than the one above by a fixed width at 2 × M but equal in depth at H. The product of M, H, and the working length L equaled A, the volume of a stair level on one side. As long as the workers had a fixed length of M and H, and the stairs were built vertically straight and horizontally flat, the calculation could be simplified as the sum of different levels, each level 2A less than the one before.⁷²

The "Introduction to Earthwork Wage Computing Plate" illustrates a device that can reduce calculations for cadres to a bare minimum (see figure 5).⁷³ It is a board designed to replace multiplication with simple addition. "For the comrades tasked with calculating the earthwork wages, especially those unfamiliar with the abacus, this plate made their job much easier."⁷⁴ Four concentric paper plates, representing "quadruple digits," "triple digits," "double digits," and "single digits," were fixed in the center with a pin but were able to rotate. Each plate had ten equal sections, marked from 0 to 9, representing cubic meters. Starting from the "single digits" board, a cadre could write the wages corresponding to the number of cubic meters in each cell. For example, if the wage rate for 1 cubic meter was 4,100 yuan, he would start with the single digit plate, writing 4,100 in the section marked "1," 8,200 in the section marked "2," and continue to multiply 4,100 with the section number, until getting 36,900 in the section marked "9."⁷⁵ He repeated this process on the double-digit plate, only adding a "0" at the end of each wage number. In this way, for a given amount of excavation, the cadre could simply turn the plates to align the numbers and then add them up. To calculate the wages for 2,456 cubic meters, all he had to do was align section "2" in the quadruple digits with section "4" in the triple digits, section "5" in the double digits, and section "6" in the single digits and add up the four numbers to get the wage, in this case 10,069,600 yuan.

These technical articles are the textual remains of an immense effort to reconfigure a socio-technological system. The fact that they concerned very small and very specific details, such as pacing steps when transporting soil or eliminating multiplication to reduce computational burdens, does not mean that they are technologically unimportant. On the contrary, getting two million peasants to change their physical practices in order to significantly increase the efficiency of earthwork and quickly turn thousands of cadres into "socialist managers" required a tremendous reconfiguring power. It was as much a seismic shift in the technological landscape as the reshaping of the Huai River itself.

Making the Socialist Peasantry

The massive effort to improve labor efficiency and technical literacy at the grassroots level depended heavily on the mass political campaign model. The standardization and intensification of labor were not natural to the peasants, who for thousands of years had worked according to their own rhythm and the rhythm of the seasons. They had to be drilled into the daily work through mass labor competitions, which rarely offered material incentives but directly linked work performance to social and political status as determined by the state. Campaigns created an exciting and festive work atmosphere to encourage peasants' participation and associated their labor with a glorious, patriotic cause. For young peasants in particular, winning labor competitions offered new opportunities for upward mobility—Youth League membership or the chance of more rewarding work in the future.

Committee leaders emphasized that the labor competitions focused on improving work methods. It was about "labor efficiency and project standards," said committee chairman Zeng Shan in a speech; "it is a race of intelligence and creativity, not a race of strength."⁷⁶ The work methods campaign was an important strategy for correcting the mistakes of 1951, when poor sanitation and heavy exertion had led to high mortality among peasant workers.⁷⁷ This "intelligence race," measured in terms of labor efficiency, required elaborate orchestration and vigorous mobilization of all levels of cadres. A "star" model team issued a challenge to all other teams in the region. Each division selected a team to respond to the challenge and simultaneously challenge all the other teams in their division. The competition then spread "like waves," as lower-level cadres eagerly promoted their own model teams. Suddenly, the teams' "declaration of challenge" flyers could be found everywhere in the pits and tents.⁷⁸

The promotion of the ZHT work methods soon led to a boom in work methods. The ZHT work methods were not meant to be a template for standardization but a model of pursuing standardization. The teams lauded for "learning from the ZHT work method" were those that observed and replicated ZHT methods and then developed their own methods to suit their working conditions. Peasant workers were encouraged to learn not only from the ZHT but also from other teams, and even members in their own team. Self-observation and reflexivity—the constant pursuit of improvement—were more important than the mere exercise of physical strength. Those who thought that the ZHT work method was nothing special or even inferior to theirs—in other words, who worked without participating in the campaign—were criticized for a "conservative and passive" attitude.⁷⁹ The effect of learning and creating work methods to improve labor efficiency was extraordinary. According to the committee, thanks to the promotion of advanced work methods, the volume of earthwork completed in the second year (late 1951 to early 1952) doubled over the previous year, with less than a 20 percent increase in the number of peasant workers. This represented an increase in labor efficiency of nearly 70 percent.⁸⁰

Fundamentally, the promotion of ZHT work methods was regarded as an important tool to reform the "peasant mindset" and cultivate a new type of peasantry. The committee emphasized that learning from ZHT would not only "reform peasants' conservative mindset of small proprietors" but also "lay a solid foundation for agricultural mutual aid and the dissemination of advanced agricultural technologies in the future." This is evident when the committee asserted that it was equally important to promote ZHT among machine-operating workers.⁸¹ The Baisha Reservoir Project in Henan was equipped with better transportation tools, including mining trucks and wheelbarrows. "Since learning the ZHT Work Methods," said Wu Zhipu, the governor of Henan Province and member of the Huai Control Committee, "the operators of mining trucks created a 'load-push rotation method' that has increased labor efficiency by 80%."⁸² Whether the ZHT work method helped the machine operators in practice was only a partial consideration. The more important goal of the tremendous mobilizing power invested in its promotion was to shatter "conservative thoughts" of all kinds.

Conservatism and passivity among the cadres were also attacked. An article with the indignant title "Open His Drawer!" is illustrative. Apparently, the workers of the Foziling Reservoir redesigned the sand and gravel sifter after learning the ZHT work method. The new design had three layers of screens arranged from top to bottom, each with a different mesh size. The workers tried different combinations, finalized the size and position of each screen, and drew a design pattern. They gave the pattern to the technical cadre, who simply put it in his drawer and did nothing with it. The frustrated workers went directly to the supply office, where they won the support of the office manager and the carpenters. Their design was a great success: the final product improved work efficiency by more than 100 percent.⁸³ Cadres did not only manage peasant workers; they could also be monitored and criticized by them.

The message that every swing of a shovel and every step of earthmoving was for the nation, for the CCP, and for Chairman Mao was conveyed through many channels. Entertaining programs such as dances, operas, and songs captured the attention of the workers. The propaganda troupes were enormous. Nearly 40,000 official propagandists (xuanchuan yuan), over 10,000 rural entertainers, eleven cultural troupes, and 378 amateur theater groups toured the construction sites along the river.⁸⁴ They made sure that after the thunderous construction ceased in the evening the sites were filled with other spirited sounds—if not the din of study sessions and literacy classes, then musical instruments and choirs.⁸⁵

Radios and loudspeakers were even more important in fueling the work ethic. With radios at construction sites broadcasting national news, the peasants learned that their work on the Huai River was part of larger, nationwide construction efforts. Local stations produced programs to support the work competitions, announcing daily team rankings. Revolutionary songs were played during working hours to "relieve exhaustion." When a task was particularly intense and dangerous—such as blocking the levee breach in the middle of a fierce current—the broadcast continued day and night, with the announcer shouting a workers' chant and urging the workers to join in.⁸⁶ The broadcasts created not only what cultural historian Li Jie calls "a shared auditory landscape" but also a shared vocal space.⁸⁷ At such moments, the peasants seemed to have become an element of the collectivity. A new socialist peasantry came into being during the mass-scale labor in building the nation's infrastructure.

Conclusion

The early PRC's ambitious development goals, combined with poor natural resources and technological endowments, drove the state toward a "choice of technique" that relied on a labor-intensive path of capital accumulation.⁸⁸ Completing the massive Huai Control Project with shovels, baskets, and rakes required a vigorous and comprehensive overhaul of the socio-technological system. The CCP's systematic effort boiled down to "the combination of politics and technology."⁸⁹ This principle dominated its development policy.⁹⁰ The CCP believed that production could only be improved by transforming people's bodies and minds.⁹¹ The politics of the "mass line" was used as the main energy amplifier, allowing the CCP to build modern infrastructure with peasants' muscle power.⁹²

To complete vast amounts of earthwork for its first large-scale infrastructure project, the CCP relied on technical, social, and political means to improve labor coordination. Promoting work methods disseminated technical know-how, provided incentives for systematic labor intensification, and encouraged the constant pursuit of intricate and efficient labor coordination. The codification and articulation of work methods by cadres endowed them with managerial and tutelage power. A new hierarchy central to Maoist everyday work culture was established by inserting cadre leadership into routine work evaluations and mass campaigns. What was the most distinctively Maoist was the laborious and persistent reliance on bottom-up participation. To ignite workers' passion for self-Taylorization—working harder and more inventively, even against their own interests—a tremendous effort was made to shape a positive psychology toward laboring for socialism. Cultural activities and study sessions created space for peasants to experience themselves as members of a new national community, while models of work method allowed individuals to associate their names with the glory of socialist construction. The formation of a new socialist labor force enabled the CCP to radically reshape the country's waterscape and landscape in a matter of decades.