After laying out the substantial challenges faced by the young People’s Republic of China in 1949, this chapter focuses on the particular ways in which revolutionary policies were implemented: by an ever shifting mix of bureaucratic and campaign modalities that were supported by a range of public performances. Bureaucracy was characterized by hierarchy, order, precedent, the strengthening of formal state institutions and a mania for classification, thus radically simplifying complex realities through a process of disaggregation; campaigns mobilized moral commitments through a different type of radical simplification – fusion into morally charged narratives and popular mobilization. Both modalities were in evidence in the two signature campaigns of 1951: the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries and land reform. While, in the early 1950s, bureaucratic and campaign modalities were co-constitutive, after the mid 1950s, they were more often in stark tension with each other.

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.

Differentiating wenshi ziliao from other kinds of history production such as gazetteers and Party histories, organizers emphasized the integration of oral history with political mobilization. Internal circulation embodied the diversity/unity strategy of the Party by creating a “safe zone” for celebrating inclusivity and plurality of expression in which Party officials, informants, writers, and editors could experiment locally with different variations of reform discourse in the realm of history. It contained heterogeneity within a framework of controlled distribution to a select group of government, Party, and academic institutions along with work units in targeted industries. Yet they remained ambivalent. The inclusiveness and diversity of the wenshi ziliao, while essential to the tasks of building a united front and bringing about political healing and reconciliation, made it difficult for the Party to control the political message that they conveyed. Unlike the previous Maoist campaigns of mass mobilization, the wenshi ziliao were a restricted approach to mobilization that involved a selective network of local elites and a semi-internal framework for publication and dissemination. They integrated the Maoist methods of mass line and investigative research with a more controlled, selective mobilization process.