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When One Day Equaled Twenty Years: China's Capitalists in the Great Leap Forward

Puck Engman
Assistant Professor
Department of History
University of California, Berkeley

In 1956, the industrialist Li Kangnian gained fame for arguing that the state should pay fixed-rate dividends for two decades to compensate for the expropriation of private firms. Not long after the Great Leap Forward began with the People's Daily announcing that "one day equals twenty years." What did this new sense of time mean for China’s capitalists? My presentation focuses on three major consequences: intensified personal reform, the departure from class-centric language, and experimentation with communal work and welfare that severed links between historic identity and community organization. Empirically, I document the competition between cities and workplaces to transform capitalists into workers. I also provide evidence for an unprecedented opening of local party and union organizations to capitalists in this period. Methodologically, I propose that the historicization of the temporalities of Chinese socialism can improve our understanding of policies and institutions just as it can elucidate the experiences and expectations of the actors involved. In conclusion, I argue that in the wake of the Leap’s collapse, the pessimist turn of ideology and the ossification of makeshift institutions marked the return of the past as the motive force of socialist politics.

Puck Engman is Assistant Professor at the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently working on a book that examines how the Chinese state defined and attempted to solve the problem of capitalists following the takeover of private enterprises and the integration of shareholders and managers in the socialist system. He is the co-editor of Victims, Perpetrators and the Role of Law in Maoist China: A Case-Study Approach (De Gruyter 2018, with Daniel Leese) and author of “What Right to Property when Rebellion is Justified? Revolution and Restitution in Shanghai” (in Justice after Mao: The Politics of Historical Truth in the People’s Republic of China, edited by Daniel Leese and Amanda Shuman, Cambridge University Press 2023).