Professional degeneration and political decay: Shanghai school teachers and the Socialist state, 1949--1968 (China)

This dissertation contributes to intellectual debates within the study of professions, the decline of state socialism, and the origins of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It documents the organizational strategies the Chinese Communist Party used to mobilize professional expertise after the 1949 Revolution and the consequences of their implementation on state and society. Using historical evidence, contemporary interviews, and a theoretical framework based on Antonio Gramsci's idea of hegemony and Emile Durkheim's work on occupational solidarity, this dissertation analyzes the situation of secondary school teachers in Shanghai from 1949 through 1968. It concludes that post-revolution changes in the professional workplace, specifically in staff composition, division of labor, compensation schedules, and disciplinary practices, engendered a multitude of workplace conflicts and a heightened sense of political resentment among professional workers. Like other Marxist-Leninist regimes pursuing socialist modernization in an underdeveloped economy, the Chinese Communists neither trusted nor removed the professional workers they inherited inside or outside the state after taking power. They used a combination of naked coercion and special privileges to expand, exploit, and control the professional workforce. My evidence suggests that this approach to building professions, which was first deployed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Revolution, contributed in the long run to the destabilization of the Chinese Communist state during the Cultural Revolution. As a consequence of state policies and actions, disgruntled professional workers attacked their colleagues and Communist officials as the mass movement unfolded. Contrary to existing research on the Cultural Revolution, in which professional workers are invisible or portrayed as victims, this dissertation demonstrates that they actively participated in the mass movement, including making violence. It demonstrates that aside from well-documented contradictions in the process of socialist production, another important reason why state socialism waned was the failure of Marxist-Leninist regimes to create a supportive professional workforce to help them organize citizen consent. Finally, it demonstrates that the structural and cultural constitution of professional groups has real political impacts on the strength and stability of political rule. It thus expands the reach of the sociology of professions into the terrain of political sociology.