Structurally Congruent Tendencies
If the Cultural Revolution is scrutinized "microscopically," as it were, taking into consideration the interplay of factions within a restricted arena over a limited time span, group interests appear predominant.[52] But if it is looked at "macroscopically," certain general tendencies emerge. Such tendencies were as often as not irrational in terms of the goals dictated by the material interests of the participants, and can more efficiently be accounted for in terms of the implications of the polemical symbol structure. Three such trends were particularly prominent: the tendencies toward anarchism , polarization , and an obsession with exposure .
Anarchism: Rebel anarchic propensities resulted from the application of the polemical symbol structure to the emergent Chinese stratification system. The symbol structure implied that any form of domination—whether based on economic, status, or political criteria—was illegitimate, any victim of repression justified in rebelling. Whereas for Mao, revolutionary cadres could still be differentiated from "capitalist-roaders" on the basis of empirical information concerning their performance, for the young rebels, lacking such "inside" information, the two classes were defined in more consistently structural terms, according to which those in authority were almost unexceptionally suspected of having "capitalist" propensities. This failure to differentiate not only led to the disqualification of most officials with any experience in running the country (roughly 60–80 percent of incumbent cadres were purged) but made it impossible to establish any authority whatever. If one rebel faction managed to "seize power" it would promptly be assailed by another faction that had been left out of the coalition, which denounced the former in the same language previously used against the established authorities. A seemingly endless series of power seizures ensued.
Mao took note of this development with considerable dismay: "The Shanghai People's Council office submitted a proposal to the Premier of the State Council in which they asked for the elimination of all chiefs," he noted. "This is extreme anarchy; it is most reactionary. Now they do not wish to refer to anyone as chief of such-and-such; they call them orderlies and attendants. . . . Actually, there always have to be chiefs."[53]
Polarization: Most adult authorities had been "toppled" or at least driven into political passivity within the first year of the movement, whereupon the still zealous rebel bands gravitated into conflict with one another. In most conflict arenas, the "free market" of numerous competing conflict groups lasted only a few months, thereafter giving way to
[52] See n. 44 above.
[53] "Chairman Mao's Speech at His Third Meeting with Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan" (February 1967), as trans. in JPRS , no. 49826, pp. 44–45.
tendencies toward attrition of intermediate groups and polarization into "two opposing factional organizations" locked into a conflict spiral.[54] For example, in Beijing a conflict between the Geology Institute and the Aeronautics Institute soon subsumed all other local Red Guard organizations and escalated to sustained warfare between what became known as the Earth and Heaven factions; in Guangdong, the struggle became polarized between the East Wind and the Red Flag factions; in Guangxi, between "April 22nd" and "Alliance Command"; in Yunnan, between "August 23rd" and "Yunnan Alliance"; and in Fujian, between the "Revolutionary Rebels" and "August 29th."[55] Such polarization was not consonant with the interests of the groups described above, for pursuit of group interests would logically lead to competition among more than two factions. Polarization also militated against the objectives common to all factions, making it impossible to "unite 95 percent of the people and cadres against 5 percent of the enemy"; in most arenas the two sides were so evenly matched that neither side could destroy the other, with the result that confrontation devolved into extended siege warfare broken by occasional sorties. Mao could not understand this tendency toward polarization, discerning no substantive issues at stake between the two factions: "There is no fundamental clash of interests within the working class," he told representatives of two contending factions. "Why should they be split into two big irreconcilable organizations? I don't understand it; some people are pulling the strings. This is inevitably the result of the manipulation by capitalist-roaders."[56]
This combative impulse and its tendency to escalate derived from the polemics, whose premium on smashing frames required an opposing structure against which a revolutionary breakthrough could be achieved;
[54] Editor, "Mass Factionalism in Communist China," Current Scene , vol. 6, no. 8 (May 15, 1968).
[55] For analyses of the Beijing and Guangdong conflicts see Hong Yung Lee, "The Political Behavior of the Radical Students and Their Social Characteristics in the Cultural Revolution," CQ, 63 (September 1975); for a brief summary of Red Guard activities in the other provinces cited see Victor C. Falkenheim, "The Cultural Revolution in Kwangsi, Yunnan and Fukien," AS , 9 (August 1969): 580–97. I know of only one exception to this tendency toward bipolarity: in Shenyang (Mukden Province), there were three factions, which coalesced in support of "backstage backers" (houtai laoban ) Chen Xilian (representing the army), Song Renqiong (representing civilian cadres), and the Navy–Air Force Headquarters (the most consistent source of radical patronage within the establishment).
[56] "Chairman Mao's Later Supreme Instructions during His Inspection Tour," Zhengfa Hongqi [Politics and law red flag], Guangzhou, combined issues nos. 3–4 (October 17, 1967). Whether "capitalist-roaders" still had any influence at this point is doubtful, but Mao was correct in suspecting that "some people are pulling the strings"—he being perhaps foremost among them. No faction was ever "destroyed" unless its backstage collapsed, with the ultimate outcome to be determined on the basis of negotiations in Beijing.
once the Party-state apparatus had been "toppled," it inspired a search for new opposition that soon brought different rebel factions into conflict with each other. The polarizing tendency derived from the dichotomous syntactic structure of the rhetoric, which in effect denied the possibility of intermediate positions, placing all terms referring to such positions between inverted commas, indicating their nominal or hypocritical character. Within the conceptual framework that the rebels in both factions used to order their arguments (and probably their thinking), it became impossible to draw subtle distinctions; only a zero-sum choice between "bourgeois" and "proletarian" could be made. In a given arena, the conflict inexorably polarized to fit the participants' two-class model of the situation:
As the two armies face each other, large posters with such slogans as "Provincial Revolutionary Rebel Joint Committee [PRRJC] is very good!" and "Sentence PRRJC to death!" are put up in the streets all of a sudden, and the whole city is resounding with such slogans as "PRRJC is finished!" and "PRRJC is growing up amidst curses!" At this critical juncture every revolutionary comrade, every organization, and the political forces of every faction must clearly indicate his attitude and choose sides. Should the PRRJC really be "Sentenced to death?" This is a question that must be answered unequivocally.[57]
Although the vivid antipodal imagery indeed made this an urgent question, it contained no answer, tending rather to sustain each faction's faith in its own righteousness and its opponent's perfidy. The polemical rhetoric provided a set of conceptual "trenches" confronting each other, so to speak. It did not specify who should occupy which positions (this decision was usually made on the basis of group interests), nor did it contain any instructions about how peace might be negotiated. Although peace was eventually imposed willy-nilly by Beijing, factional loyalties and antipathies were forged that continued to have a subdued effect for many years thereafter, sometimes even surviving the official termination of the Cultural Revolution in July 1977.
Exposure: The "two worlds" structure of symbolism conveyed the general impression of a deep cleft between the world of appearance and the world of reality, that the apparent world contained no reliable indicators of the nature of the real world. This disjunction occasioned a sense of outrage and an ambition to reduce appearances to their underlying naked realities. In short, there was a general suspicion of the conventional, which predicated a correspondence between revealed/concealed and phony/real. The systematically misleading relationship between
[57] "Guangdong Rebel Joint Committee Proclamation," Guangdong Zhan Bao [Guangdong battle news], February 22, 1967, trans. in JPRS , no. 41450, pp. 79–82.
appearance and reality was more subtly indicated by addition of inverted commas or the adjective "suowei " (so-called) to the once illustrious title of the target, as in suowei scholars (xuezhe ), specialists (zhuanjia ), or authorities (quanwei , dangquan pai ).
The quest for exposure was to be undertaken "resolutely, thoroughly, wholly and completely" (jianjue chedi ganjing quanbu de ), to quote one of Mao's characteristic contributions to the language,[58] with the ultimate intention of annihilating the sphere of "bourgeois privacy" and realizing the ancient ideal, "all for the public interest, nothing for oneself" (da gong wu si ). Any indication that an authority was protecting some aspect of the policy process from full public scrutiny aroused suspicion that one was "shielding" the guilty from legitimate criticism.[59] Thus Red Guards and Revolutionary Rebels systematically violated attempts to preserve secrecy by launching raids in search of "black materials," ransacking homes and offices, interviewing interested subordinate officials (or finding allies among them, such as Yao Dengshan in the Foreign Ministry), torturing or otherwise encouraging intimates of the targets to bear witness against them (e.g., Liu Shaoqi's estranged ex-wife and their two children testified voluntarily; his current wife was abducted and "struggled"),[60] and for the first time breaching the Party's hitherto sacrosanct internal file system. "What's so terrific about secrets?" a participant in the notorious raid on the Foreign Ministry files asked rhetorically. "To Hell with them!"[61] Sometimes in the context of such raids rebels would seize the opportunity to destroy their own files—only to plunge into deeper trouble later, for without a dossier one could be suspected of anything.
Once such secret information was discovered, the motto da gong wu si dictated that it be made public. This was done either via big-character posters, which could be written anonymously by anyone and soon "covered every available wall and mat," or in rebel tabloids (xiaobao ), which came to comprise a vast and lively alternative media system. Some tabloids appeared daily, others every third or fourth day; some were printed, some hectographed; some original, others plagiarized; some local, some with national circulations (for several months in 1967, Qinghua University's Jinggangshan had a circulation exceeding that of
[58] Mao Zedong Zhuxi Yulu [Quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong], pp. 98, 143, as quoted in Chuang, Little Red Book . See also Alan Liu, Political Culture , pp. 153–56.
[59] Cf. Neale Hunter, Shanghai Journal: An Eyewitness Account of the Cultural Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1969), p. 36: "To them [viz ., the Red Guards], Yang Hsi-kuang was saying, 'Hands off the Party leaders! Criticize anyone you like, but the Municipal Committee is sacrosanct.' This was precisely the attitude they were out to destroy."
[60] See "Three Trials of Pickpocket Wang Kuang-mei," as trans. in Current Background , no. 848 (February 27, 1968), pp. 1–42.
[61] Ross Terrill, "The 800,000,000, Part II: China and the World," The Atlantic 229 (January 1972), pp. 39–63, at p. 49.
People's Daily ).[62] Printed media were augmented by oral communications, which came to comprise a nationwide rumor network. Early in the movement the interdict on inter-city mobility was placed in abeyance in order to facilitate mobilization, and Red Guards set up a network of liaison stations, which functioned like diplomatic missions and were connected by envoys and commercial telegraph facilities. These stations were extremely effective in disseminating news (e.g., in July 1967, Jiang Qing's instruction to "attack with reason and defend with force" was followed within a few hours by Red Guard arms seizures—it was not until a few days later that her instruction was published in the official press). Sensational and irresponsible as it was, this alternative media system was richer in content and often more accurate than the official press.
This almost obsessive rebel interest in exposure seemed, however, to harbor an underlying ambivalence. For although Red Guards denounced authorities for hypocritically concealing their crimes and displaying only their virtues, when an authority actually made a statement revealing reservations about Mao's leadership, however obliquely (as in Deng Tuo's satires of the early 1960s),[63] he would be condemned for "shamelessly" and "audaciously shouting," "fanatically trumpeting," and so forth. Even if one confessed, the confession was invariably rejected as "superficial" and "fraudulent."
The reason for this ambivalence has to do with the fact that secrecy was not merely a "cover" used by capitalist-roaders in the Party to protect themselves from public accountability, but a regular dimension of organization—both "revisionist" and "revolutionary" leaders communicated through organizational channels, made decisions in closed meetings, and otherwise adhered to the rules of information security. So no one was finally proof against accusations of "coverups." Zhou Enlai came under repeated attack for shielding his vice-premiers, for example, and a purge of acting Chief-of-Staff Yang Chengwu amid allusions to a "black backer" even excited momentary suspicions of Lin Biao. When the May 16th Group was purged in September 1967, Jiang Qing accused its leaders of "collecting black material on every one of us, and it may throw it out in public at any time."[64] As chapter 3 has already indicated, secrecy played a pervasive role in Chinese society as a criterion for organizational
[62] T. K. Tong, "Red Guard Newspapers," Columbia Forum 12, no. 1 (Spring 1969): 38–41.
[63] Trans. in Joachim Glaubitz, Opposition Gegen Mao: Abendspräche am Yanshan und andere politische Dokumente (Olten: Walter Verlag, 1969).
[64] See CCP Documents of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong: Union Research Institute, 1969), pp. 72, 309, and 503 for an indication of the CCRG's shift of position on this pivotal issue.
self-definition and hierarchy. Possession of privileged information helped to define "inside" (nei ) from "outside" (wai ), and "top" (shang ) from "bottom" (xia ): the unit was thus set off from its environment, Party from non-Party, leaders from masses. It was precisely the multifunctional utility of secrecy—and the invidious element common to these functions—that endowed its critique with such widespread appeal.