On Bureaucratic Ownership: From Anti-Bureaucratism to Anti-Official Profiteering
Scholars have long debated whether the transition from the Mao Zedong era to Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up was a moment of rupture or continuity. One influential view holds that the 1980s saw a rise of Western-influenced liberalism (Calhoun 1994) and Deng’s program marked a ‘fundamental departure’ from Maoism (Vogel 2011). This rupture thesis is challenged by those who emphasise the continuity of the Party-State apparatus through recurring institutional crises (Meisner 1996; Wu 2014). They argue that Deng-era development policies were not a post-1978 invention but rooted in the longstanding structural logic of the Party-State system established after 1949.
However, this continuity account downplays the mechanics of pre-reform developmentalism, in which the Party-State’s monopoly over resources and labour delivered growth at enormous human cost. By romanticising aggregate human development indicators and collective infrastructure as systemic achievements, this approach overlooks how these gains rested on predatory extraction, the wholesale sacrifice of peasant lives, and the absolute subordination of individual survival to state accumulation (Gao 2013). Consequently, this framework fails to reconcile its celebration of institutional welfare with the structural violence of systemic famines and state-fabricated crises. While Perry (1994) punctures this golden-age myth—showing how workers deployed protest repertoires during the 1957 strike waves to expose structural labour contradictions, particularly the post-1956 decline in worker welfare and the widening cadre–worker gap—scholarship still lacks an account of how cross-generational resistance conceptualised and challenged the Party-State’s property relations and class conditions over the following decades.
This essay advances a different account of continuity by arguing that, from Mao to Deng, unofficial writings used class analysis and empirical scrutiny of resource control to challenge the narrative of the Party-State’s self-claimed ‘public ownership’. These texts conceptualised the Party-State as a bureaucratic ruling class, in which the apparatus itself functioned as a property-owning and wealth-appropriating entity. By examining underground manuscripts, big-character posters, and mimeographed magazines, this essay traces a lineage of heterodox discourse. It shows how the 1957 critiques of social hierarchies and the challenges to the bloodline theory during the Cultural Revolution laid the groundwork for the Democracy Wall and the 1989 movement. Drawing on this heterodox lineage, dissidents in 1989 reactivated earlier reflections on bureaucratic exploitation, translating this critique into a direct challenge to guandao (官倒, ‘official profiteering’) and authoritarian rule.
From Discursive Contestation to the Interrogation of Ownership
During the Mao era, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) characterised systemic oppression as mere ‘work style issues’ (工作作风问题) of individuals that could be corrected through internal discipline. This framing shaped the party’s use of the terms ‘bureaucratism’ (官僚主义) and ‘privilege’ (特权) for nearly a decade before unofficial heterodox thought ruptured it in 1957, when students and intellectuals argued that the problem was in fact structural.
The CCP originally used ‘bureaucratism’ to mobilise against the ‘bureaucratic capitalism’ (官僚资本主义) of the Kuomintang (KMT), accusing the old regime of structural corruption and asset monopolisation. After 1949, ‘anti-bureaucratism’ (反对官僚主义) became the primary tool for the CCP to discipline cadres and police society; by linking it to ‘violations of law and discipline’ (违法乱纪) and ‘anti-party’ (反党) activities, the central leadership secured the implementation of top-down policy. In 1957, however, students and intellectuals used big-character posters and mimeographed publications to reveal that bureaucratism was rooted in autocracy and the deprivation of civil liberties (Qian 1998). Because these media practices exposed the fundamental contradiction between the ‘Party’s Empire’ (党天下) and independent expression and democratic practice, the authorities suppressed their spontaneous use (Li 2004).
Like ‘bureaucratism’, the CCP’s early discourse on ‘privilege’ was primarily directed against KMT, feudal, and imperialist privilege, thereby legitimising post-1949 campaigns such as the suppression of counterrevolutionaries, land reform, and the so-called War to Resist America and Aid Korea. Later, the concept was redirected to cadres’ ‘bad work styles’ (坏的工作作风). During the Sino-Soviet ideological polemics, the CCP’s ‘Ninth Comment’ (九评)—a document that primarily critiqued the Soviet Bloc under Nikita Khrushchev as ‘revisionist’, opposed its policies of ‘de-Stalinisation’, and contested leadership of the international communist movement—accused the Soviet system of generating a privileged stratum comprising bureaucratic elements and a new bourgeoisie detached from the masses. In the Mao era, ‘anti-privilege’, ‘anti-bureaucratism’, and ‘class’ became the only legitimate categories of critique.
The 1957 big-character posters and mimeographed magazines broke through the monopolised expressive environment established after 1949, carving out a heterogeneous space for communication and converting individual lived experiences and grievances into public debates. The poster series ‘On the Development of Classes’ (论阶级的发展), authored by students and teachers during the democracy movement of 1957, argued that a new social hierarchy had emerged after 1949: although the old classes had been liquidated, relations of dominance persisted, and the party, government, and military cadres who controlled the distribution of the means of production and held command authority formed a new privileged class. Though the system was euphemistically termed ‘ownership by the whole people’ (全民所有制), its distributive inequalities were stark, with the income gap between top central officials and the lowest-tier peasants reaching a factor of 800 (Zhou 1957).
The methods used in 1957 to criticise ideological dogma analysed the structural roots of the Party-State more rigorously than subsequent Cultural Revolution discussions, relying on scientific inquiry, a return to Karl Marx’s original writings, and a vocabulary independent of CCP orthodoxy and free of the mandatory invocation of Maoism that characterised the Cultural Revolution. From 1958 until the onset of the Cultural Revolution, the CCP systematically suppressed and filtered these 1957 arguments, which diagnosed party autocracy as the root of inequality and championed democratisation as the means to eradicate privilege. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, state education had reduced critical vocabulary to Maoist language and officially sanctioned Marxist paradigms. In contrast, in 1957, when the People’s Republic of China still belonged to the Soviet Bloc, unofficial critical thought and analysis were influenced by dissident currents elsewhere in the bloc; those participating in the 1957 campus democracy movement could draw on far richer intellectual sources.
Opposing Bloodline Theory and the Discourse of the New Class in the Cultural Revolution
The interrogation of power structures continued during Cultural Revolution debates about family background and class analysis. The rigid social hierarchies established after 1949 relegated peasants to the bottom and subjected state-designated ‘class enemies’ (阶级敌人) such as ‘the Black Five Categories’ (黑五类) to systemic persecution and even physical elimination. Against the ‘bloodline theory’ (血统论) promoted by elite cadre-child Red Guards in August 1966, which asserted that political character was determined solely by state-assigned parental class labels, the essay ‘On Family Origin’ (出身论) (Yu 1967) challenged this lineage-based exclusion and exposed the paradox of a ‘socialist state’ replicating a hereditary system rooted in cadre privilege (Yi 2019).
The potency of this pamphlet lay in its logical deduction, satirical tone, and independent circulation. The state monopoly over printing had forced dissident texts onto private correspondence and rudimentary mimeograph machines; the fracturing of grassroots control in early 1967, however, allowed the essay to reach movable-type printing and mass circulation. This practice of autonomous production transformed isolated existential grievances into a collective political discourse. By challenging birth-based exclusion, the essay pierced the regime’s ideological veil, shifting the debate from mere identity discrimination to a structural interrogation of the institutional apparatus that manufactured inherited privileges and fuelled political killings (Wang 2023; Tan 2017).
Unofficial writings during the Cultural Revolution targeted the essence of power even more directly: under ‘socialist public ownership’, who controlled the means of production? This interrogation marked heterodox discourse’s departure from official propaganda, which urged the ‘overthrow of capitalist roaders’ (打倒走资本主义道路的当权派) and turned instead to a systematic analysis of institutionalised appropriation. Official discourse concurrently redefined ‘bureaucratism’ from a mere ‘cadre style issue’ into ‘anti-revisionism’ (反对修正主义)—a semantic pivot that served political purges without touching the Party-State apparatus or personal autocracy. Conversely, ‘On New Trends of Thought’(论新思潮) (Editorial Board of Lun Xin Sichao 2006), authored by a rebel group in Beijing, argued that ‘capitalist roaders’ were turning public property into a private domain (化公为私), while ‘Whither China?’ (中国向何处去) (Yang 1968), authored by a writer behind Changsha’s dissident publications, posited the rule of a ‘new bureaucratic bourgeois class ’(新的官僚资产阶级) formed since 1949.
These analyses no longer treated privilege as an individual moral flaw typified by ‘going through the back door’ (走后门), but as a systemic phenomenon of wealth appropriation through control of the state apparatus (Yin 2009: 125–26). This exposure of the ‘privatisation of public ownership’ effectively reframed the Party-State apparatus as an engine of primitive accumulation, drawing on expropriated land, resources, and peasant labour.
This independent analytical framework did not emerge in an intellectual vacuum. In the late 1960s, heterodox underground groups gradually expanded their reading materials through channels such as ‘Internal References’ (内部参考), drawing on Milovan Djilas’s The New Class (1957)—a volume that systematically analysed the evolution of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia while dissecting how the Communist Party had transformed into a new ruling and exploiting class under Soviet-style communism. Published internally as a ‘grey-cover book’ in 1963, Djilas’s work circulated widely in unofficial circles after 1967 before its formal reprinting in the early 1980s. These external intellectual resources provided the critical vocabulary and theoretical scaffolding for unofficial texts to lay bare the political-economic essence of the Chinese Party-State.
These critiques were rooted in material realities. After 1949, China operated under a highly centralised command economy, in which cadre privilege extended far beyond widening income disparities to encompass institutionalised perquisites such as special supplies (特供), housing, health care, and education (Yang 2016).
The Rediscovery of 1989 and the Critique of Official Profiteering
The tools and arguments used by protesters in 1989 reached back to the Cultural Revolution. With the outbreak of the revolution, the ‘Four Big’ (四大, comprising free speech, full airing of views, great debates, and big-character posters) were initially deployed as tools for official top-down mobilisation. The regime enshrined these mechanisms in the 1975 and 1978 constitutions, codifying the legitimacy of Mao’s mass-mobilisation strategy. This official institutionalisation inadvertently provided legal fissures for independent civil action and the transmission of subversive memories.
These ‘Four Big’ forms persisted beyond the Cultural Revolution and were reappropriated during the 1978–79 Democracy Wall movement. By reusing historical vocabulary such as ‘citizen newspapers/magazines’ (民刊/民报) and ‘unofficial’ (民间) from the late Qing and Republican eras, dissidents reconnected with China’s modern tradition of independent publishing and autonomous analyses of power. Although the authorities suppressed the Democracy Wall in 1979 and officially abolished the ‘Four Big’ in 1980—a repeal written into the 1982 Constitution—to close these autonomous public spaces, the media forms themselves endured. Sustained through clandestine domestic mimeographs, smuggled publications, quasi-official periodicals, and book series, this practice sustained informal resistance networks within the fissures of official control throughout the 1980s, before re-emerging through the big-character posters, leaflets, and telex machines of 1989.
This multilayered continuity, spanning print media, theoretical networks, and underground spaces, directly shaped the driving force of the 1989 protests: a systemic challenge to the bureaucratic hereditary hierarchy and its market-era counterpart, guandao. Although the state-managed commercialisation of the 1980s induced new economic fractures, the writers were not merely reacting to immediate material shocks. Rather, within the bureaucratically controlled dual-track market, they reactivated a longstanding analysis of the Party-State’s core mechanism—namely, the monopoly over public resources of political power.
The discourse of 1989 was no mere replication of the Cultural Revolution. While unofficial publications during the Cultural Revolution remained largely confined within the Maoist discursive framework, the ‘citizen newspapers/magazines’ of 1989 interwove Marxism-Leninism with the May Fourth intellectual legacy, drawing simultaneously from Eastern European dissident thought and Western political theory. Despite these transnational currents, the 1989 texts remained anchored in domestic history—China’s long cycles of dynastic autocracy and the trajectories of its two republics—using this frame to dissect the institutional roots of post-1949 disasters.
This critique resonated anew in the mid-1980s. In 1986, the manuscript of ‘The Manifesto of Young Marxists’ appeared at Peking University, reinvoking Marx’s warning that state organs could transform from ‘servants of society’ into ‘masters of society’. The manifesto argued that ‘public ownership’ was, in essence, ‘officers’ ownership’ (Shao 2019).
Amid the hyperinflation of 1988–89, big-character posters further analysed the link between the economic crisis and bureaucratic plunder (BL 1989). ‘Anti–official profiteering’ resonated so widely because it translated the relatively abstract ‘New Class’ theories of the Cultural Revolution into a form of plunder tangible in daily life. This marked not a new phenomenon, but a rediscovery of the enduring mechanism by which the Party-State system’s power monopolised resources, now under market conditions. This text-based class analysis challenged the conventional wisdom that the post-1949 order had been egalitarian before Reform and Opening. Demands to disclose leaders’ assets and eliminate nepotism thus evolved into calls for systemic transformation and democratic practice in both politics and the economy.
Leaflets from 1989 directly linked ‘anti-bureaucratism’ with critiques of corruption, nepotism, and unchecked power. Rather than targeting Maoist ‘capitalist roaders’, they exposed how bureaucratic expropriation under the banner of revolution during the Mao era had evolved into guandao plunder under the guise of Dengist reform. By tracing this trajectory, these writings revealed the predatory reality underlying the CCP’s claim to ‘public ownership’: that political capital was systematically converted into private economic gain. ‘Anti–official profiteering’ (反官倒) became a key term in 1989 and crystallised this argument, diagnosing political power as a profit-making mechanism rather than protesting isolated corruption. Leaflets wove this accusation into a broader struggle for democracy, arguing that the only remedy lay in structural overhaul through civic participation, public oversight, and the right of recall (BL 1989).
From the Cultural Revolution to 1989, invoking Paris Commune principles (such as democratic elections, the right of recall, and the equalisation of official salaries) remained an indispensable tool for systemic analysis. The difference lay in the context: during the Cultural Revolution, this discourse was often instrumentalised within factional struggles or armed conflicts, whereas by 1989, it attained genuine autonomy, directly appealing to citizen sovereignty to challenge the legitimacy of power structures. This continuity reflects an enduring, fundamental inquiry: why would a regime claiming to represent the people repeatedly replicate a bureaucratic structure of exploitation that institutionalises privilege and inequality?
This shift towards autonomous critique was made possible because dissident writers had been building a new vocabulary. Since the 1950s, unofficial texts had consistently sought to breach official ideological frameworks and construct an independent language. Beyond Cultural Revolution–era critiques, heterodox writing also drew inspiration from science, unofficial literature, and art. To conduct genuine analysis, these authors recognised the necessity of stepping outside the linguistic logic of the Party-State and dissected contemporary power by contrasting it with historical autocracies.
By the 1980s, independent writers had gained wider access to previously restricted ‘Internal References’, together with a large influx of newly translated foreign works on politics and philosophy and publications from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Among these clandestine texts were Letters of Chen Duxiu in His Later Years (陈独秀晚年书信) and Zheng Chaolin’s State Capitalism (国家资本主义). Bypassing official censorship to recover histories long erased by the Party-State, these writings exposed the institutional essence of the regime and provided a rich analytical vocabulary. Equipped with these frameworks, independent writers in the 1980s focused more intensively on how political power was converted into resource appropriation and how inequality was institutionally reproduced.
Bureaucratic Ownership: Discursive Transformation and the ‘Turmoil’ Debate
Language became a battleground in 1989. The authorities labelled the protest movement ‘turmoil’ (动乱), later upgrading the charge to a ‘counterrevolutionary riot’ (反革命暴乱) and thereby justifying a forceful state response. This logic mirrored earlier precedents in the party’s governance; in 1967–69, during the height of the Cultural Revolution, the military had similarly intervened under the guise of managing ‘turmoil’, imposing military control to manufacture legitimacy for reclaiming centralised power. For Deng Xiaoping, who placed the CCP’s monopoly above all else, enforcing military control was a coherent response. The 1989 martial law ultimately resurrected this historical playbook, discursively transforming the suppression of citizens’ rights into a necessary defence of party stability.
The 1989 movement consciously resisted this violent Cultural Revolution language. While the authorities used ‘turmoil’ to evoke memories of violent ‘ruthless struggle’ (无情斗争), 1989 leaflets repeatedly emphasised ‘reason and nonviolence’ (理性非暴力). This rationality reflected on the CCP’s history of violence: protesters recognised that borrowing the tools of autocratic violence would compromise the very vision of citizen sovereignty they sought to realise. Protesters thus blocked military vehicles, campaigned among soldiers, and dismantled the official ‘turmoil’ narrative (BL 1989).
One leaflet widely circulated in late May 1989, titled ‘Just Who Has Created the Turmoil of the Past Forty Years [40年来, 究竟谁制造了动乱)]?’, directly inverted the state’s rhetoric. It argued that the true source of systemic instability was not the citizenry, but a ruling elite who monopolised power, manufactured historical catastrophes such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward famine, and the Cultural Revolution, and continuously suppressed basic rights. This critique marked a decisive discursive turn: rather than merely defending the movement against official smears, unofficial writers established an autonomous narrative of citizen sovereignty, systematically turning the Party-State’s historical record of violence into an indictment of its ruling legitimacy.
This language of ‘democracy’ (民主) in 1989 had roots in the Cultural Revolution, though with important differences. The heterodox debates of the Cultural Revolution regarding power limitations and oversight rights confined democracy within modifiers such as ‘democracy under the dictatorship of the proletariat’(无产阶级专政下的民主), treating it as a mobilisation tool within a class framework rather than a structural constraint on power. Because power remained anchored in revolutionary narratives rather than citizen authorisation, these earlier critiques ultimately failed to articulate a coherent basis for political legitimacy outside the Party-State system.
In contrast, the 1989 movement transformed democracy from a mere instrument into a political end. Unshackled from CCP-specific class labels, ‘democracy’ became inextricably linked to civic agency, constitutional guarantees, and institutional oversight, emerging as an autonomous discourse of citizen empowerment. By reinterpreting the May Fourth concept of democracy and weaving political accountability together with economic justice, this discourse bypassed paternalistic state models in favour of citizen sovereignty. In so doing, it synthesised decades of cross-generational exploration into a coherent political vision.
Yet, in practice, the movement retained an internalised paternalistic logic of ‘petitioning’ (请愿). This was exemplified by kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People, pinning one’s hopes on an enlightened top leadership, and paradoxically deploying portraits of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai to oppose Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng. After martial law was declared, the movement narrowed to a single strategic focus—the physical occupation of Tiananmen Square and institutional appeals to the National People’s Congress Standing Committee—eclipsing alternative paths of cross-class grassroots self-organisation. This tactical impasse reflected the lingering constraints of the Party-State’s political culture, highlighting the difficulty of translating an independent civic awakening into sustained, structurally autonomous resistance.
Unresolved Questions and Managed History
Tracing this lineage across the post-1949 era reveals that citizen publications have persistently questioned the structural contradictions of power and property within the ‘Party’s Empire’ (党天下). Contested since 1949, issues of bureaucratic privilege, identity hierarchies, and monopolistic domination have repeatedly exposed how this power mechanism, under the guise of socialist construction, operated as an engine of predatory accumulation. These systemic grievances have been buried in history, only to re-emerge through new forms of expression at each critical moment.
To neutralise this enduring threat, the Party-State has long enforced a totalising quarantine of this 1949–89 historical continuum. It has weaponised official history resolutions to recast structural contradictions—along with institutionally engineered famines and catastrophes—as sanitised narratives of ‘individual errors’ (个人错误), ‘localised problems’(局部问题), and ‘explorations in the course of development’ (发展中的探索). From the ‘no debate’ (不争论) pragmatism of the early reform era to recent ideological campaigns against ‘historical nihilism’, this memory management systematically targets any independent writing that connects formative post-1949 civil resistance, Cultural Revolution heterodoxy, and the 1989 crackdown. By isolating these historical echoes and obliterating the ledger of the 1989 repression, the regime seeks to sever the intergenerational transmission of resistance memory altogether.
Under this immense pressure, citizens still interrogate the legitimacy of power. As Ernst Bloch (1986) noted, ‘new and unexpired ideas’ remain both ‘premonitory glimmerings and extended after-glowings’. Given the unresolved core of the Party-State’s ‘bureaucratic ownership’, these submerged metaphors of resistance, forged over four decades of heterodox thought, will inevitably surface again at future historic junctures.
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