352 { China’s Quest
mammoth inefficiency and waste. But investment in consumer goods and
public infrastructure was starved to feed expanding heavy industry. Most
basic goods—grain, cooking oil, cloth—were rationed. So too were luxury
goods: bicycles, watches and clocks, radios, simple box cameras, and elec-
tric fans. It typically took many years of work and a rare ration coupon to
acquire one of these scarce luxuries. Electricity was available in very lim-
ited quantities. Apartments were often lit by one or a very few low-wattage
light bulbs. Residential areas grew around new industrial centers, but little
investment went to construct, maintain, or improve housing. Housing was
bare-bones and very crowded. For most noncadre urban residents, bathing
and toilets were in communal facilities. Few noncadre residences had
in-home bathing, hot water, telephone, or even toilets. Transportation was
by very crowded bus or train, or by bicycle. Brownouts and blackouts were
common. In the countryside, conditions were even worse, often downright
primitive. However, isolated from the outside world and fed a constant diet
of revolutionary propaganda, most Chinese did not realize how poor they
really were. As China began learning about the advanced capitalist coun-
tries after 1978, people became aware of the fabulous levels of wealth com-
mon in those countries—and of their own poverty.
Ideological belief soon began to fade. Creation of a communist society was
the justification of the privation and hardship inflicted on people under the
Stalinist/Maoist economy. A large portion of the Chinese people had embraced
this ideal in the 1950s, but belief faded with each successive crisis: the famine
of the Great Leap Forward, the violence of the Cultural Revolution, the Lin
Biao affair, the disrespectful funeral given the beloved Zhou Enlai. By the
late 1970s, Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought was still used to rally
popular support for the CCP, but it no longer resonated with large sections
of the Chinese people. During the intense intra-CCP debate of 1977 through
early 1980 about making a clean break with the Cultural Revolution and its
policies, participants referred frequently to charting a new course as a matter
of “life or death” and determining the “future of our party and country.” The
writer Zhou Yang, for example, put it this way:
The more one looks at the progress of the debate [underway], the more
one comes to see how important it is. If a political party, a state, a nation
does everything according to the books, its thinking is ossified ... then it
will not move forward. Its life will stop, and the party and country will
perish.^6
Although participants in the debate did not spell out exactly how the
PRC and/or the CCP regime might “perish,” the implicit idea was that popu-
lar support for the regime would ebb. Unless standards of living could be
raised quickly and substantially, and unless the burden of oppression laid on
the Chinese people could be eased, the party would be left without popular