10 - Cadres, Grain, and Rural Conflicts

Summary

Drawing on local judicial records and on-the-ground interviews, the chapter examines two criminal cases in a Shandong village, highlighting how, in the hyper-politicized context of the Great Leap Forward, factional struggles among rural elites took on a dangerous new significance. The revival of the Socialist Education Movement saw the downfall of two leading cadres in early 1960. The local lineage made a series of incendiary allegations against them, leading to their removal from office, prosecution, and long-term imprisonment. A key learning from this case study concerns the way in which the implementation of campaigns, as well as judicial punishments, produced contingency. At the local level, campaigns were not just a path by which the state achieved or failed to achieve its own goals, but also provided a framework for individuals to exercise their own agency. Meanwhile, a decentralized judicial system with limited safeguards and poor evidence-gathering and case-making practices allowed campaign-induced conflict to spill over into criminal punishment. The convergence of campaign-style politics with politicalized legal enforcement seems inevitably to have ratcheted up the stakes to the point where only one endgame was possible: a bitter struggle followed by brutal and ultimately fatal punishments.