The Brief, Tumultuous History of “Big Democracy” in China’s Factories

This article compares two fateful experiments conducted during the Mao era in China that encouraged freewheeling criticism of Communist cadres: the 1957 Party Rectification campaign and the early upheavals of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1968). Through a content analysis of articles published in the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily, we first show that the two movements shared characteristics that made them very similar to each other and remarkably different from all other mass campaigns carried out during the Mao era. We then analyze the differences between the two movements—and their consequences—by investigating how they unfolded in factories, based mainly on interviews with workers and party cadres. We argue that key elements of the strategy Mao pursued during the Cultural Revolution were developed in response to the unmitigated failure of the 1957 campaign and these elements fostered a movement more capable of compelling Communist cadres to face criticism from below. In comparing the two movements, we highlight the evolution of the term “big democracy,” which was uniquely associated with these two episodes, but was deployed very differently in 1966 than it was in 1957.