Leaders from villages and from the townships,
call them into the county seat and read the documents to them.
Now this actually gave county officials an awful lot of leeway themselves,
because they could alter the content of the policy.
If there was something that they didn't like about it or
if it wasn't quite appropriate for the locality.
They could shift the policy somewhat.
Now, we can think about different kinds of campaigns.
We can think about economic campaigns.
We can think about political campaigns.
We can think about ideological, or mass indoctrination campaigns.
We see lots of those in China.
And this kind of mobilization, besides putting pressure on the citizens,
also put a lot of pressure on CCP members,
because they had to meet targets, or quotas.
And the failure to meet those quotas could really have a big impact on their careers.
Now, particularly with economic campaigns,
one of the strategies that the communist party has always used.
And it sort of borrows it somewhat from the past,
pre modern China, is to use models.
And these models would be put forward to encourage implementation
by showing the positive impact of a policy.
It would show, it would say things like so and so was doing this.
Isn't he good?
This is a positive thing you should want to be like this comrade and
behave in this positive way.
The problem though is that, many models and particularly if they were localities.
We're successful because the central government gave them some special
assistance, gave them extra money or gave them extra labor.
Things that may not have been made public at the time.
So they would get special benefits.
Or, if you were an early implementor, if there was some new kind of policy
opportunity and you moved quickly, your locality moved quickly.
You could get benefits that the later participants just could not gain.
And one of the examples of this, one of the cases I found very interesting.
I've written about this.
Was in 1988 the central government decided under the coastal developement strategy.
To push township and village enterprises,
the local rural factories, to get involved in exports.
And to persuade them to do this, there were articles in People's Daily,
articles in Peasant Daily.
All kinds of propaganda talking about certain villages who
implemented this policy, who got involved in exports, and they got rich.
And so people would hear about this.
Immediately, villages would try to follow the same kind of strategy.
But many of those villages actually lost a lot of money.
Because, there were already too many people producing the good, so
they couldn't export their product, or
they just didn't have any foreign markets at all.
And so there were reports later on of communities that went bankrupt
in trying to follow this campaign.