Since the overthrow of the “ gang of four” and the rejection of the Maoist strategy for economic development, Deng Xiaoping and his allies have initiated new policies about the hiring, paying and rewarding of industrial labour. These labour policies are designed to raise the productivity of factory labour by increasing work incentives and utilizing workers more efficiently than in the past. The implementation of piecework-type wages and bonuses, point systems for bonuses, and examinations for hiring and promotion, represent a shift towards a new, efficiency-oriented, meritocratic industrial organization in China. The old organizational models which prevailed in the past - the seniority based model of the pre-1966 era as well as the politicized, “ virtuocratic” model of the Cultural Revolution decade - are being repudiated. Reforming industrial organization in China has been no easy task. The meritocratic norm, “ to each according to his work” is difficult to translate into concrete distributive rules. Different groups of employees disagree about the fairness of various distributive criteria. Informal patterns of group behaviour often subvert the intentions of managers and policy-makers. And managers themselves hand out bonuses indiscriminately in a manner which enhances their own popularity but not productivity.

The destruction of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) main base areas in Jiangxi province was regarded by the Nationalist government as a major accomplishment, and in many respects it certainly was. In the last of the five great encirclement campaigns launched under Jiang Jieshi's direction 800,000 soldiers, thousands of civilian cadres and political workers, and myriads of ordinary citizens were mobilized into a huge organization which, like some giant anaconda, ponderously coiled its long lines of roads and blockhouses around the Soviet areas in South Jiangxi, squeezing more and more tightly for a year and a half until, in late 1934, a tattered and worn remnant of the CCP was able to slip wearily between its folds and set out on the epic Long March. Behind in Jiangxi it largely abandoned the wasted carcass of the Central Soviet Area to the Nationalist government.

While social scientists have examined in some detail the income earning activities of Chinese peasants in communes, the primary focus of these studies has been to describe the general pattern of peasant behaviour – the orthodox, legitimate, legally sanctioned methods for increasing collective (and household) income. What these studies ignore, however, is the existence of a “second economy” in rural China, characterized by a wide range of informal, extra– or illegal strategies also designed to enhance collective income. In Guangdong from 1962 to 1974 these included: altering the size of production units; speculation; fraudulent loan applications; corruption; theft; withholding goods or services; false reporting; and violence or demonstrations. While acknowledging that these activities did not represent the norm, nonetheless, a systematic discussion of informal and perhaps deviant behaviour, highlighting time and participant variations, is necessary to form a more accurate picture of Chinese peasant behaviour.

Obviously, literature is a question of quality rather than quantity. In a speech given on 19 June 1961, which was only published in the Literary Gazette (Wenyi bao) in February 1979 as the cultural testament of the late premier, Zhou Enlai drew a crude parallel between literary and industrial outputs: “Certain laws governing material production also hold good for mental production. When pressed too far mental production will suffer, perhaps even more seriously. Quotas and pressures of time are vexing problems for mental workers. Take the writing of poetry as an example. Among our leading cadres, Comrade Chen Yi likes to write poems. He composes very quickly and is a prolific writer. He is a genius in this respect. But, it is different with Chairman Mao. He writes only after much deliberation. Though he writes less, he writes with such magnificence and vitality and produces extremely concentrated poems. We should not demand a poem a day from Chairman Mao, nor should we interfere with Comrade Chen Yi and ask him to write less. Mental work cannot be uniform.”

“To tell the truth, never, in China or abroad, has there been a revolutionary party as decrepit (tuitang) and degenerate (fubai) as we [the Guomindang] are today; nor one as lacking spirit, lacking discipline, and even more, lacking standards of right and wrong as we are today. This kind of party should long ago have been destroyed and swept away!”1

One of the major tasks facing the post- ”gang of four“ leadership of China is that of developing and consolidating a legal system. Success in this endeavour depends in great part upon the establishment of the people's faith in legality. The popular press often refers to the Cultural Revolution years as a time of absolute lawlessness1 in which arbitrary arrests and imprisonment, procedural violations, and baseless slander were the order of the day. Personal accounts of those years tend to confirm this view. They tend also to indicate that many people have little faith in the law and are cynical about the prospects for the success of legality in China. Undoubtedly, this cynicism stems from fresh memories of the types of abuse referred to in the press. And, because it overlays the traditional Chinese distrust of law as a method of resolving social disputes, it is a peculiarly intractable cynicism.