9 - Letters from the People

Summary

This chapter examines the petition system in the early People’s Republic of China. While the state’s policies related to “handling letters and visits from the people” were in some ways a continuation of long-standing traditions, this chapter argues that Maoist political culture reshaped letters-and-visits work in revolutionary ways. Interacting with the people by answering their letters and talking with them in government reception offices were two of the concrete tasks associated with the implementation of the Communist Party’s most fundamental governance strategy, the mass line. Work with letters and visits was one of the instruments Party leaders themselves used to observe and gauge the nature and success of their mass-line work. Documents from this endeavor certainly show that the people’s views were not consistently represented in political discourse and that mass-line rhetoric did sometimes aid Party Central in its more authoritarian endeavors. However, the history of letters and visits also reveals that the early PRC state was never able to fully realize the potential of petitions as a surveillance tool. At the same time, the central importance of mass-line discourse gave both rhetorical and practical power to ordinary people, in ways that had marked effects on state and society.