Quota, Class, and Political Violence in Mao's China

Abstract

By investigating a one thousandth national execution quota issued in the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (1950–1953), the article explores an aspect of Maoist politics that has largely escaped mainstream scholarship on Mao, the CCP, and PRC history. It shows how the newly created Maoist regime sought to eliminate its political enemy based on a specific demographic estimate of one thousandth. Tracing the roots of this quantification of political enemies into Mao's class-analysis theory back to the 1920s and explaining other political campaigns throughout the 1950s as continuations of the party's use of this method, the article argues that quantitative concepts and relations were important instruments in Maoist ideology, the CCP's political strategy and the working of the party-state. By proposing a concept of “quotacide,” the article identifies an ignored type of large-scale, ideologically based, and politically driven homicide in the history of political violence. The article also brings in similar quantitative policies of political suppression in other authoritarian party-states such as the Soviet Union (the 1930s) and North Vietnam (the 1950s) in this context.