7
The Beneficiaries and the Victims

After arresting the Gang of Four, the coalition of CR beneficiaries and surviving veteran revolutionaries faced several urgent issues. The first was how to justify its extraordinary move against Madame Mao's radical group while at the same time establishing the authority of Hua Guofeng. Then it had to deal with how to characterize and criticize the Gang of Four's political errors and determine how best to investigate and purge it, without undermining the legitimacy of Mao and the CR. Finally, the coalition had to address the subject of the ongoing anti-Deng campaign, as well as the question of who should be rehabilitated as innocent victims of the Gang of Four. All these interrelated questions were given more concrete form in the issue of Deng Xiaoping's rehabilitation, the issue which had profound policy and power implications for Hua.^[1]

From the very beginning, Hua Guofeng had few options in resolving these issues. As a beneficiary of the CR, Hua could not negate the CR or Mao. But he had to repudiate the Gang of Four and demonstrate that his ideology and policies differed from theirs. Since Hua benefited from Deng's purge, initiated by the Gang of Four, bringing him back posed a serious threat to his own political survival. In contrast, the survivors, his coalition partners, could move in either direction on all issues except Mao's legitimacy.

Given this dilemma, the possibility was slim that Hua and his followers could initiate a new ideology and policy by critically reevaluating the political decisions made during the CR. The only available strategy was to uphold Mao's legitimacy while narrowly limiting the scope of criticism, purge, and rehabilitation. In fact, Hua

[1] For Hua's position on these issues, see "Speech on the Second National Conference on Learning from Tachai in Agriculture," Beijing Review , 1 January 1977, 31–43; 31 March 1978; 16 June 1978.

upheld Mao's view that a bourgeoisie existed in the Communist Party, but he condemned the Gang of Four's attack on the old cadres on the grounds that, although some veterans had indeed been in error, the radicals' struggle against them was excessive. Hua declared an end to the CR, but he defended its achievements by specifically endorsing Mao's continuous revolution, while promising to revolutionize the government's superstructure.^[2]

The Issue of Rehabilitation

Hua approached the question of rehabilitation with caution. According to a Taiwanese source, a document from the central organizational department, dated October 1976, laid down guidelines for purging and rehabilitation. It specified that only "those who were rejected, attacked, removed from positions, or expelled from the party by the Gang of Four for their resistance to the [Gang of Four's] counterrevolutionary line" would be reinstated. At the same time, it refused to review cases involving "renegades, spies, Trotskyites, counterrevolutionaries, KMT elements, or degenerates," as well as all cases for which the organization had already arrived at a conclusion.^[3] Anyone demanding the reversal of such cases would be punished. In brief, rehabilitation was intended for only a small number of CR victims, and even the right to reopen cases was denied to the majority of victims.^[4]

The beneficiaries justified their policy in terms of defending "whatever Mao had said and decided." Otherwise, they argued, many past decisions would be challenged.

If we always look backward, we will always be settling accounts with bygone things. We will have to negate the "Cultural Revolution," and then everything from the "Gang of Four" to the Socialist Education Movement in cities and villages, from the Lin Biao affair to the Lushan conference. If the Lushan conference is negated, we will have to negate the socialist transformation of industry and commerce, the antirightist struggle, the Great Leap Forward, and then the people's commune policy. If it were not for this tendency to look backward, there could be no such statement as, "There were mistakes

[2] Ibid., 1 January 1977.

[3] Zhongyang Ribao (Taiwan), 4 November 1976.

[4] Renmin Ribao , 28 August 1979.

in the general line, and it is difficult to make another Great Leap Forward, the people's communes are no longer acceptable, and the 'three Red Banners are at half-staff.' " Whether this view is advanced by the masses of the people or by people in the cultural realm, I can definitely say that it is a serious mistake to make this assertion. If we settle accounts with bygone things one after another and invalidate one stage after another, how can socialism exist?^[5]

The pressure to bring Deng back was, however, too strong for Hua.^[6] Deng enjoyed not only the sympathy and understanding of the surviving as well as the rehabilitated cadres, but also the genuine support of the Chinese masses. Provincial leaders and Politburo members allegedly petitioned the CCP for Deng's rehabilitation. Particularly outspoken were Chen Yun and Wang Zhen, who pleaded eloquently at the February central work conference for Deng Xiaoping's rehabilitation "for the sake of the Chinese revolution and China's needs"; Chen and Wang also asked that the decision on the Tiananmen incident be revoked. Despite Hua's refusal to publish the speeches, they spread widely by word of mouth.^[7] Ordinary people also expressed their wishes by placing small bottles (xiaoping ) along major streets.^[8] Then Deng Xiaoping wrote two letters to Hua, one promising support and the other expressing willingness to work at the front line.^[9]

According to numerous sources, Deng's offer prompted a hot debate at meetings on the highest level. Most of the veteran leaders favored Deng's rehabilitation; Xu Shiyu was especially vehement. Like Hua, most beneficiaries of the CR initially objected to reinstating Deng on the grounds that Mao had approved his dismissal. Under pressure, Wang Dongxing finally agreed to bring Deng back, on the condition that Mao's decisions would not be reversed.^[10] Another Chinese source reported that Hua Guofeng

[5] "Zhang Pinghua's Speech to Cadres in the Cultural Field," Issues and Studies , 14(12) (December 1978), 91–119.

[6] For the anti-Deng campaign after the fall of the Gang of Four, see William A. Joseph, The Critique of Ultra-Leftism in China, 1958–1981 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984).

[7] Dangshi Tongxun , no. 2, 20 January 1983.

[8] Harry Harding, China's Second Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), 59.

[9] Ming Bao (Hong Kong), 9 July 1979.

[10] Feijing Yuebao 1 (23) (19 January 1979):65–68.

did not open his mouth during the debate, and when Chen Yonggui finally voted for Deng's rehabilitation, those in favor had only one vote more than those opposed.

Dens made his first public appearance at the third plenary session held on 16 July 1977. This meeting reconfirmed Hua's appointment to the chairmanship and reinstated Deng to all of his previous positions: member of the standing committee of the Politburo, vice chairman of the CCP, vice chairman of the Military Affairs Commission, and chief of staff of the PLA. At the meeting they also decided to expel the Gang of Four from the party.

Table 27 shows how in the newly elected Eleventh Central Committee, cadre representation increased from 33 percent in the Tenth CC to 42 percent, whereas mass representation decreased from 37 percent to a mere 29 percent, and the PLA's from 30 percent to 26 percent, thereby breaking the almost perfect balance among the three groups achieved in the Tenth CC. Among the sixty-three cadres who were added to the Eleventh CC, nineteen of them were former Eighth CC members, and the rest included many rehabilitated cadres, for example, Cai Suli (Henan party committee), Yu Mingtao (central-south party bureau), Wan Li (Beijing party committee), and Kang Xien (former petroleum minister). Moreover, even such controversial cadres as Xiao Wangdong, former deputy minister of culture, and Wu Lengxi, former editor in chief of Renmin Ribao , who had been especially attacked during the CR, now joined the Central Committee. Altogether more than a third of the sixty-three new members were rehabilitated cadres. The majority of the remainder at the time of the CR were middle-level cadres who had survived the mass purges and obtained positions on revolutionary committees. To a striking extent, then, the Eleventh CC was composed of rehabilitated cadres.

Table 28 examines the survival rate of those who entered the Eleventh CC for the first time and those who were left over from the Tenth CC. The difference between the two groups in terms of the percentage of those who failed to make it into the Twelfth CC is amazingly small (47 percent versus 45 percent). This may mean that Hua's preference was weakly reflected in the process of selecting cadres (except in the case of mass representatives), or else his preference did not differ very much from that of the rehabilitated. From table 28 we can also infer that Hua did not remove all of the Gang of Four's sympathizers from the committee. If so, Hua might have intentionally protected them as a potential coalition partner. Or perhaps he simply did not have enough time and organizational capability thoroughly to investigate their followers.

Table 29 shows that rehabilitation almost guaranteed survival; 97 percent (100) of the rehabilitated cadres of the Eleventh CC en-

tered either the Twelfth CC or the Advisory Commission, whereas only 3 percent (three) of them can still be considered as purged.

Despite the large influx of CR victims, the Eleventh Party Congress as a whole still upheld Mao's thought as a guiding principle, and reconfirmed class struggle and continuous revolution as the main tasks of the socialist revolution in the revised party constitution. In his report about political work, Hua again elaborated his view of continuous revolution, condemning the "powerholders taking the capitalist road," "bourgeois legal rights," and "the sole emphasis on productive forces," while only promising to uphold "proletarian dictatorship in the various fields." It was later reported that Deng objected to a certain part of Hua's speech when he was shown a draft, and many other veteran cadres criticized Hua's wholesale praise for the achievements of the CR. Hua, however, rejected all the criticism.^[11]

The Eleventh Party Congress apparently represented a moment of compromise between those who had suffered and those who had prospered during the CR. Even though many old cadres recovered their positions, Deng Xiaoping's group agreed to the rhetoric of the other side, which insisted on Mao's ideological legitimacy. But what the other side may not have foreseen was that these rehabilitated cadres, with their extensive experiences, were very skillful in political maneuvering. Moreover, increasing criticism of the Gang of Four and anyone involved with them inevitably called for a reevaluation of the soundness of Mao's thought.

Purging the Gang of Four Followers

Those whom the CR had favored and those who had been victims differed on the nature of the Gang of Four's mistakes and the number of their followers. Viewing the radicals as a conspiratorial group, the beneficiaries tried to limit the scope of the purges and rehabilitation and to uphold all of Mao's decisions, whereas the victims were determined to remove their luckier or more politically adroit confreres in order to reverse any of Mao's decisions that seemed wrong to them.

[11] Dangshi Tongxun , no. 2, 20 January 1983.

During Hua's leadership public criticism of the Jiang Qing group—which was carried out under tight control of the party organization, lest embarrassing questions for the beneficiaries were raised—underwent three different stages as Hua had originally envisioned: the first focused on the exposure of the Gang's "plot to usurp power," the second dealt with their "past criminal records," and the last condemned the "ultrarightist essence of their counterrevolutionary revisionist line."^[12]

The central leadership headed by Hua prepared official criticism materials, setting the tone for each stage of the campaign. Taking cues from official materials, various units published criticism of the radicals' concrete crimes in their units. Condemning the Gang of Four as "typical representatives of the bourgeois inside the party" who had "subverted the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to restore capitalism," the first batch of official materials focused largely on their characters and class backgrounds, which they had allegedly falsified to "sneak into positions of authority." The second batch stressed the radicals' efforts to usurp political power against Mao's will since the campaign to criticize Confucius and Lin Biao, while failing to touch upon the radicals' activities in the earlier stages of the CR.^[13]

The official view—that the radicals were an "ultrarightist conspiratorial" group that had betrayed Mao's instructions in an attempt to seize power—turned the thrust of the campaign to those who "endeavored to restore capitalism," while failing to correct "leftist errors" in the official line.^[14] Arguing that investigating the Gang of Four would create an atmosphere favorable to capitalist trends, the beneficiaries initiated the "double-blow movement" to investigate the Gang's followers and to check the "destructive activities of the class enemy," who undermined the collective economy at the basic level.^[15]

As to the question of who should be regarded as the Gang of Four's followers, the beneficiaries insisted that "only a few [had] participated in the Gang's conspiracy." In particular, the central

[12] Zhonggong Yanjiu 12(19) (15 September 1978):99–108.

[13] "Document of the Central Committee (Zhongfa ), No. 37, 1977," Issues and Studies , 14(7), July 1978, 81–102.

[14] Renmin Ribao , 7 April 1977.

[15] Beijing Review , 1 January 1977; 10 March 1978.

organizational department specified in October 1976 who should be purged. First, only close associates of the Gang of Four were vulnerable, whereas those who "involuntarily cooperated with the Gang" were to be forgiven. Second, close associates were safe if they recanted. Third, people who had merely done or said something wrong were not be included in any punitive measures. Hua Guofeng reiterated a similar line in all his public speeches, stressing that most of the cadres who had done or said something wrong deserved education, not punishment.^[16] He divided even the "backbone elements" into those who recanted by exposing the crimes of the Gang of Four and the "stubborn elements."^[17] Thus, even the radicals who had genuinely sympathized with the Gang could defend themselves by insisting that their relationship was merely organizational and that "my problem was that of carrying out orders, and [the mistakes] cannot be charged to my account."^[18] As for who should replace the Gang's associates, Hua reiterated Mao's five requirements for a revolutionary successor and the three-in-one formula of young, middle-aged, and old cadres.^[19]

Hua Guofeng was very slow in changing the provincial leadership, either because of his limited organizational capabilities or because of his desire to protect Gang of Four sympathizers. For instance, before Deng's formal comeback in July only seven provincial first party secretaries had been replaced, while many leaders suspected of having had close connections with the Gang were allowed to stay in power.^[20] Guo Yufeng, who later turned out be a Gang of Four associate, stayed on as director of the organizational department, formally heading the campaign against the radicals until the end of 1977.

Furthermore, rank-and-file cadres were not eager aggressively to pursus the Gang's followers. At that time they were confused and totally demoralized by the constant changes in official policy. Many of them had learned that making too many enemies was not

[16] Renmin Ribao , 13 April 1977.

[17] Zhonggong Yanjiu 12(19) (15 September 1978):99–108.

[18] Renmin Ribao , 16 April 1978; 12 June 1978.

[19] Ibid., 20 March 1978.

[20] Some of the provincial leaders Hua appointed turned out to have close relationships with the Gang of Four. For instance, Liu Guangtao was made first secretary of Heilongjiang province in January 1977, only to be removed by the end of the year.

good for their careers. Moreover, the leadership of each unit was still so splintered that carrying out an objective and fair investigation was impossible.^[21]

Despite the proliferating articles denouncing the Gang of Four, the campaign to "expose and criticize" did not have much impact in 1977. According to his opponents, Hua's campaign "investigated only small matters, but not big matters; investigated only the lower level, not the upper level; investigated only outside matters, not inside matters; investigated only matters tangentially related, not immediate matters."^[22] As a result, only a few very well-known radicals were investigated and dismissed.^[23]

As more victims of the CR were reinstated to politically influential positions, the campaign against the radicals was bound to expose Hua's tactics of "tacit discontinuity and overt defense" of the CR and Mao Zedong's thought.^[24] When the public campaign expanded to touch upon the Gang's specific policies—particularly "production relations" versus productive forces and the role of profit and material incentives in economic management—it became obvious that the Gang's policy was ultraleft rather than ultraright.^[25] This compelled the beneficiaries to change the official label to "ultraleft in appearance, but ultraright in essence."^[26]

Nonetheless, the victims of the CR were not willing to accept the validity of this new label. For instance, Renmin Ribao questioned whether the Gang of Four carried out a "proletarian dictatorship or fascist dictatorship?"^[27] Once the Gang's dictatorship was labeled fascist and its ties with Lin Biao openly discussed, it was a matter of time before the radicals were condemned as ultraleftists.^[28] The change in terminology brought about an upsurge of articles de-

[21] Renmin Ribao , 22 June 1978.

[22] Ibid., 13 January 1978.

[23] For instance, the Gang of Four's followers in Shanghai—Ma Tianxiu and Xu Jingxian—and at Beijing University—Wang Lianglong, Li Jiaokun, and Guo Conglin—were arrested and investigated.

[24] Lowell Dittmer, China's Continuous Revolution: The Post-Liberation Epoch, 1949–1981 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).

[25] For instance, see "The Gang of Four's Attack on 'Sole Productive Forces' Is an Attack on Historical Dialectics," Renmin Ribao , 11 January 1978.

[26] Ibid., 6 February 1977; October 14, 1977; 7 March 1978.

[27] Ibid., 11 June 1977.

[28] Joseph, Critique of Ultra-Leftism , 184, 168; Renmin Ribao , 23 March 1978; 3 April 1978.

manding the correction of ultraleftism and, by implication, the Maoist line on beneficiaries. A Renmin Ribao article argued that if the Gang of Four's mistakes were not correctly identified as ultraleftist, there would be no way to correct them. As evidence, the article explained how Wang Ming's error in calling Li Lisan's policy ultraright justified the ultraleftist mistakes that Wang continued to make. Other articles made it plainer that without a thorough criticism of the Gang of Four's ultraleftism, the old cadres could not be rehabilitated.^[29]

Public criticism eventually expanded to raise the question of those who had benefited from the CR by managing to muddle through the mass movements ("remaining faction"), by adjusting themselves to whatever was the prevailing trend ("wind faction"), and by shaking up the political structure ("earthquake faction").^[30] The translations of these picturesque Chinese terms point to the questionable relationship of the beneficiaries with the Gang of Four at the early stage of the CR.

From the beginning, Deng Xiaoping advocated the removal of broader categories of radicals. In his speech to the municipal party secretaries on 27 December 1977, he established three criteria for determining who should be purged.^[31] First, all those who collected materials against Zhou Enlai and Zhu De during the CR, "irrespective of intentions, positions, abilities, and political performance," should be investigated and removed from office. This applied also to the masses, who had acted without ulterior political motives. Second, all those who had developed close relationships with Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, had acted on their instructions, and had cultivated them before and during the CR were to be dismissed from positions of leadership regardless of seniority and whether or not their actions caused any bad effects. Those who did not incur the people's resentment should not be punished, but instead of staying in leadership positions, such cadres should be forced "to earn their bread through laboring." Third, all cadres who had persecuted old cadres and collected "black materials"

[29] Renmin Ribao , 3 March 1979.

[30] Ibid., 10 January 1978.

[31] Feijing Yuebao , 21(7), January 1989, 25–30.

should be dismissed even if they had done so in the name of Mao Zedong's thought.^[32]

Scrutiny of the Gang of Four's followers stepped up when Hu Yaobang assumed responsibility for the central organizational department in December 1977. He acted decisively, changing the leadership of organizational departments at lower levels and appointing newly rehabilitated cadres to leadership positions at the provincial level. Local newspapers began to criticize several provincial leaders for their close ties with the Gang of Four and for their efforts to keep the lid on the campaign against the Gang.^[33] The newly reinstated cadres had many political reasons thoroughly to investigate the radicals who had attacked them. They adjusted the leading personnel on the lower levels and dispatched work teams to supervise the criticism. For instance, the new provincial party secretary of Shanxi province organized ten investigation teams with 100 cadres to check the results of the previous campaign to criticize the Gang of Four.^[34] The Jilin provincial party committee first rehabilitated five old cadres who "had suffered the most from the Gang of Four's persecution" and then placed them in charge of organizing the work teams to be sent out to the various units. Even lower-level units organized and sent out work teams to subordinate units.^[35] By mid-1978, the issue of how to handle cadres promoted in "the two surprise attacks" had surfaced.^[36] Although official policy was to decide cases individually, it seems very likely that almost all of those who had benefited from "helicopter promotion" eventually lost their positions.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Xie Xuekong of Tianjin was removed from his office in June, Wu De in October, Zeng Shaosha of Liaoning and Yu Daiching of Inner Mongolia in October, Li Ruishan of Shaanxi in December, Liu Zhenxun of Henan in October, and Saifudin of Xinjiang in February. The reorganization of the State Council removed such persons as Wang Yang, Li Chitai, and Sha Feng, who were not yet criticized by name. Through the summer of 1978 a few more provincial leaders, whose connection with the Gang of Four was not very obvious, came under attack too and eventually were removed from office. Provincial party leaders who came under public attack during this period in early 1978 include Saifudin of Xinjiang, Li Ruishan of Shanxi, Lung Daichung of Inner Mongolia, and Zhang Boshan of Hunan. See Beijing Ribao , 7 December 1979; Renmin Ribao , 30 March 1978.

[34] Renmin Ribao , 11 June 1979.

[35] Ibid., 13 February 1978.

[36] Ibid., 28 June 1978; 4 September 1979.

After the third plenum in December 1978, Hua Guofeng declared that the check on the Gang's followers had been completed. But rehabilitated cadres continued to stress the importance of thorough checking, and they launched what they called reexamination (fu cha ) of the radicals.^[37] More stringent criteria to verify previous campaign investigations were set up by various units. For instance, the Anshan Steel Mill Corporation organized sixteen inspection teams that used thirty criteria to see whether a unit had carried out its campaign properly.^[38]Renmin Ribao recommended that six conditions be met before ending the campaign against the Gang of Four.^[39] The rehabilitated cadres eventually put the Gang on public trial and adopted the "Resolution on Some Historical Questions," which officially acknowledged Mao's mistakes in the CR. The Gang's associates were further investigated as the "three types of people" during the party rectification campaign of 1983–85.

The "Two Whatevers" and "Practice"

The fundamental differences between the beneficiaries and victims of the CR were brought into sharp focus by the seemingly innocuous question, what constitutes the criteria for determining truth? The beneficiaries took the position that "whatever Chairman Mao said and decided" should be upheld, whereas the rehabilitated emphasized "practice" (shijian ) as the "sole criteria for empirical truth."

The beneficiaries coined the phrase "the two whatevers" (liang ge fanxi ) to use as "the basic weapon" for rejecting demands to reinstate Deng Xiaoping and to reverse the decision about the Tiananmen Square incident.^[40] By contrast, pragmatic Deng Xiao-

[37] For instance, see ibid., 14 April 1978 for the several investigations carried out by the Nanjing municipal party committee.

[38] Renmin Ribao , 13 May 1978; 20 January 1979.

[39] They were (1) thorough investigation of those who joined the Gang of Four to seize power, (2) criticism of the Gang's revisionist line, (3) readjusting the makeup of the leadership group by expelling Gang followers, (4) complete rehabilitation of cadres who had suffered as a result of false charges or mistaken or wrong decisions, (5) restoration of the good traditions of the party, and (6) unity and stability. Renmin Ribao , 5 January 1979.

[40] Dangshi Tongxun , no. 2, 30 January 1983; Cankao Ziliao , 24 March 1963.

ping (who reportedly declared even before the CR that regardless of whether it is black or white, any cat that catches a mouse is a good cat) had many reasons to stress "practice." Even before his official rehabilitation, he allegedly objected to "the two whatevers" view in his letter to the party center.^[41] No sooner had he been rehabilitated than he publicly argued that the essence of Mao Zedong's thought was to "seek truth from facts."

The final showdown between "the two whatevers" and "practice" views took place at a work conference organized to discuss the upcoming third plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress (held from 10 November to 15 December 1978). According to official Chinese sources, Hua Guofeng initially objected to the idea of convening the conference, and when the meeting was held, he tried to limit discussion to economic questions. Once the meeting began, however, many veteran leaders demanded that "some historical problems" be discussed. For instance, Chen Yun argued (in his speech to the northeastern group) that prior to discussing economic issues, some remaining historical cases should be resolved. "Without resolving these questions, there is no way of unifying the entire people." In particular, he raised questions about six cases: (1) the case of sixty-one counterrevolutionary people including Bo Yibo, (2) the central organizational department's seventy-seven decisions made in 1937 and the wrong decision made in 1940 about the "two political systems," (3) the problems of Tao Zhu and Wang Hoshou, (4) the Peng Dehuai problem, (5) the Tiananmen Square incident, and (6) the question of Kang Sheng. Other veteran cadres followed Chen Yun by tabling a motion to discuss the "January Power Seizure," the "February Adverse Current," the "Campaign to Criticize Deng," and even the question of the CR and Mao himself. The heated debate between the two groups lasted thirty-six days—"the longest meeting after the fall of the Gang of Four"—finally adjourning after deciding that everybody would be allowed to speak freely on these issues at the third plenum.^[42]

The third plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress, which some Chinese regarded as the "Second Zunyi Conference" (Mao emerged as the supreme leader of the CCP after the first Zunyi Conference

[41] Daily Report , 24 August 1981; Renwu , no. 1, 1982, 10.

[42] Dangshi Tongxun , no. 2, 20 January 1983.

in 1935), was a watershed in many regards. It adopted economic development as the regime's ultimate goal, while promising not to use mass movements as a means to implement policy. At the meeting, the balance of power tilted toward the rehabilitated cadre group, and Deng Xiaoping emerged as the number one leader. Old cadres like Huang Kecheng, Wang Renzhong, Hu Yaobang, and Yang Shangkun regained not only their honors but also important government and party positions. Hu was elected to the Politburo and appointed third secretary of the disciplinary committee. By contrast, although many beneficiaries retained their seats on the Politburo or the Central Committee, they lost other powerful and influential positions.

In retrospect, Hua Guofeng's chance of survival was always slight. The purge of the Gang of Four, whose ideology was further left than his own, exposed him to political pressure from the right. Once their common enemy was overthrown, Hua's group did not have the leverage to keep the old cadres behind him. Although the survivors initially made efforts to bring Hua's group and the rehabilitated cadres together, they chose the rehabilitated over the beneficiaries when they were forced to make a choice, because the beneficiaries lacked deep personal ties among themselves—ties that would have reinforced political ties. Many of them had not even had work relations before being promoted to leading positions at the center, and after Mao's death they did not have any patron to bind them together. Without such informal ties, no beneficiary was willing to risk his chance to survive individually by backing another.

Neither did the beneficiaries have enough time to develop a broad power base in the party-state bureaucracy, although some had support in the provinces from which they originally came (e.g., Hunan for Hua Guofeng, Henan for Qi Denggui). Their relation to military leaders at central and local levels was very tenuous. In addition, they could not resort to mass mobilization, the method that the radicals used for inner party struggles. Moreover, they did not even have any mass constituency to mobilize (because most Chinese people were thoroughly disenchanted with the CR). The beneficiaries, therefore, pursued the strategy of defense and compromise, yielding to the pressure of their adversaries on issue after issue. In turn, the rehabilitated effectively used a guerrilla strategy

of nibbling at the beneficiaries' power base and then finally destroying them as a coherent political group. The rehabilitated cadres, with more political experience, a stronger power base in the bureaucracy, and higher prestige positions, were destined to win once Deng Xiaoping was reinstated for the second time.