Five—
Charismatic Succession?

Due to the pivotal importance of the period in the ultimate fate of the Chinese Revolution, this and the two following chapters are devoted to the attempt to consolidate and continue the Cultural Revolution between 1968 and 1976. By 1968 there was overall agreement that the Cultural Revolution could not be permitted to continue in the chaotic form it had assumed; however, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the mood about what had been achieved was still quite optimistic. Charismatic leadership seemed to have been revitalized, such that a few words from Mao seemed capable of eliciting immediate national compliance. The masses had been mobilized, and in a more penetrating, less ritualized manner than in any previous movement since land reform. Finally, the frames had been smashed: not merely the frames of the residual structure, but the frames of the emergent socialist regime—creating the opportunity for a new, fully legitimate structure to be built. True, the Cultural Revolution had been more specific about what should be destroyed than about what should be constructed in its place, but the obverse implications of the critique of the "capitalist road" seemed to offer broad guidelines for a socialist new world.

The reasons this new world failed to materialize had to do with critical failures in each of the three functional requisites of continuing revolution alluded to at the outset of this study. The so-called "late" Cultural Revolution period is so crucial because it was at this time, and not during the highly disturbing but superficially successful period of spontaneous uprisings, that these failures occurred. This chapter will analyze charismatic leadership and its disintegration over the issue of how to consolidate and perpetuate itself. Chapter 6 examines the attempt to continue mass mobilization as an end in itself, in the face of difficulties in finding a rational linkage to economic production on the one hand, and problems in correlating cultural transformation with political struggle on the other. Chapter 7 is concerned with the fragmentation of the emergent political structure in the context of succession conflict and the other systemic malfunctions noted.

According to the conventionally accepted conception of charisma,

succession is tautologically impossible, for charisma is defined as a uniquely personal quality that defies transmission. The definition proposed here emphasizes in contrast the performance of a salvationary mission, and there seems to be no a priori reason why the successor to a charismatic leader should not also be able to conceive and perform such a mission (e.g., cf. Nehru's succession to Gandhi). If charismatic succession fails, as it certainly did in the case of Mao Zedong, it fails for empirical rather than definitional reasons, and therefore empirical research is called for to explain that failure.

The following account focuses, then, on mission, and on the struggle to recover it on the one hand and to bequeath it on the other. This struggle not only pitted potential successors against one another, but elicited a conflict of interest between incumbents and would-be successors. The struggle went through three phases. In the first phase, explicit pre-mortem succession arrangements were made in order to eliminate rivalry and facilitate a smooth transition, but these arrangements were hampered by continuing inter-successor friction and finally derailed by an incumbent-successor (Mao vs. Lin) disagreement over the very nature of charismatic leadership. In the second phase, specific pre-mortem succession arrangements were suspended in favor of a vague commitment to "collective" succession, but Zhou Enlai in fact quickly emerged as implicit heir apparent, and a divergence emerged between Mao and Zhou over the definition of mission. Mao's position seems to have been damaged by the indecisive factionalism that greeted the campaign to study "proletarian dictatorship," however, and he withdrew to a much less active (indeed, partially disabled) role. At about the same time, Zhou Enlai withdrew to the hospital with what was to prove terminal stomach cancer. In the wake of Mao's retirement and Zhou's fatal illness, a new set of potential successors emerged and began to compete actively to "grasp" the "line" (i.e., preemptively define the mission) that would legitimate their accession and delegitimate rivals. From his position as ultimate arbiter of the mission, Mao feebly roused himself to forestall its preemption, adopting a balance-of-power strategy and shifting repeatedly from one potential successor to another. The end result was that not only was charismatic succession frustrated, but the prestige of the leadership as a whole suffered grievously from the damage done to its image of resolute unity and decision-making infallibility.

The Collapse of Pre-mortem Succession Arrangements

The end of the early Cultural Revolution brought a transition from ideological struggle to relatively naked power struggle. This is partly because principled ideological opponents had been eliminated in the

purge. But probably an even more important factor was the sharp curtailment of central power that resulted from the movement. To begin with, the central Party-state apparatus was decimated by mass criticism and sweeping purges. As for the regional apparatus, Mao had in the course of the movement convinced its leaders that he would not hesitate to throw them to the wolves without any semblance of due process. Thus, they had no recourse but to learn to fend for themselves if they wished to survive—and many did so with considerable skill, becoming "self-reliant" in the process. The "revolutionary masses," a vocally supportive but rambunctious melee, had been silenced by their demobilization. The resulting "power shortage" intensified the scramble for power—as in a market, as supply declined, demand increased. The catastrophically abortive Lin Biao succession should be placed in this context. This analysis of the incident will begin with a brief review of its itinerary, then proceed to an examination of underlying inter-successor and successor-incumbent conflicts.

Rescission of Successorship and Polarization

The ostensible reason for Mao to disown the pre-mortem arrangements he had made on behalf of Lin Biao was a dispute over the state chairmanship that Liu Shaoqi had vacated—an essentially ceremonial position that seems to have acquired disproportionate symbolic significance in the uncertain political milieu. Mao's own position was not immediately at risk: Lin apparently anticipated a postsuccession challenge from Zhou Enlai, and sought leverage against him from the nominally superior position of chief of state. He suggested that Mao himself assume the position, expecting him to decline and offer it to Lin. As expected, Mao rejected the post, first offering it not to Lin but to Zhou at a February 1970 meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee; the latter, however, declined, fearing that Mao planned to replace him as premier with Zhang Chunqiao.^[1] In March, upon issuing directives on revision of the State Constitution, Mao first indicated his preference that the position be abolished. Yet Lin once again proposed to Mao that the position be filled in July, when a committee for revision of the Constitution was established under Mao and Lin; once again Mao rejected the idea. "If there is no chief of state, where can we put Vice-Chairman Lin?" wondered Lin's wife, Ye Qun.^[2] To Lin, Mao's veto was a clear signal that he had fallen from grace—how far, he could only speculate, but the precedents were not encouraging—and he began to seek recourse to desperate expedients.

On the first day of the Second Plenum of the Ninth CC (August 23–September 6, 1970, at Lushan), Chen Boda proposed to the twenty-

[1] Reuters (London), February 9, 1970; in FBIS , February 9, 1970, p. B7.

[2] Han Suyin, My House Has Two Doors (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1980), pp. 505 ff.

five assembled delegates that the agenda be tabled and there be discussion of a new State Constitution that would include the post of State Chairman, nominating Mao to fill this post. Chen's motion was supported by the eight military leaders of Lin's faction, but the military region commanders sustained Mao in his objections to the idea. After two and a half days of debate, a majority of the Plenum rejected the proposal and approved disciplinary sanctions against Chen. On September 15 Mao issued a "letter to the whole Party" calling for a rectification campaign to "raise the ability to distinguish true and false Marxism" (tigao bianbie zhenjia Makesizhuyi de nengli )—that is, to criticize "false Marxist" Chen Boda.^[3] Lin declined Mao's invitation to join in the criticism of Chen. In December 1970, at an enlarged Politburo meeting convened at Beidaihe (the "North China Conference"), Lin and his supporters were criticized but a majority still declined to take a strong position against Chen; finally, in April 1971 (at the "Meeting of the Ninety-nine"), the "eight big generals" were obliged to submit self-criticisms for their support of Chen's proposal, thereby driving a wedge between Lin and his most powerful military backers. In January 1971, Mao had the Thirty-eighth Army transferred from Beijing and moved to "let some air in" to the CC's Military Affairs Commission (formerly dominated by Lin) by appointing his own supporters. Early in 1971 a campaign was launched admonishing military cadres to overcome arrogance, conceit, harshness, and other nonproletarian behavior.^[4]

As Mao's moves against Lin monopolized public communications channels and official meeting forums, any attempt by Lin to resist was driven underground. In February–March 1971 he apparently authorized his son Lin Liguo to prepare a plan for a violent coup d'état. Although the "Outline of 571 Project" later revealed was alleged to have been such a plot, it was actually only notes taken on a random talk, containing abundant evidence of resentment but no operational plans. It seems safe to assume that foul play must have been afoot to precipitate the breakneck flight that culminated in the September 13, 1971, incineration of Lin Biao, his wife, and several aides—though Zhou Enlai asserted in the immediate aftermath of the incident that Lin had not even dared to implement his scheme, inasmuch as only a "handful of people" were

[3] The joint editorial for the new year (1971) stressed the need to study Marxism-Leninism to uncover "phony Marxists," and a drive was launched against "5/16" (the May 16th group), whose "backstage boss" was now said to be Chen Boda. Leo Goodstadt, "China: Calendar of the Conspiracy," FEER 74, no. 48 (November 27, 1971), pp. 20–25; see also China Topics (Hong Kong), May 19, 1969, YB527. The movements against Chen climaxed in a long series of articles anonymously criticizing him that appeared in RR , HQ , and GM between March and July 1971.

[4] Ying-mao Kau, ed., The Lin Piao Affair (White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts & Sciences Press, 1975), pp. xix–lxxvii.

willing to help him out.^[5] Much more detailed charges (but no new evidence) of plans to assassinate Mao and his supporters (including Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan) were presented at the public trial a decade later, and an even more elaborate (but never consummated) plan was subsequently alleged by an anonymous but seemingly well-informed defector.^[6] The precise details of the confrontation thus remain elusive, but all accounts concur on its essentials: there was friction between Mao and Lin arising from Mao's decision to rescind his pre-mortem succession arrangements, leading to conspiratorial activity on both sides that culminated in Lin's death.

Inter-successor Conflict

Having received an unprecedentedly explicit endorsement as Mao's sole designated successor (it was written into the Party Constitution at the Ninth Congress), Lin committed the tactical blunder of alienating other major power-holders and attempting to staff the apparatus exclusively with his "own" people. Thus he found himself in a politically isolated position when his patron deserted him. To be sure, it would have been difficult to propitiate those who had previously figured in the succession lineup and stood to gain if Lin's heir apparency were disclaimed, but Lin might have attempted to co-opt them by promoting their efforts in functionally spcialized areas not politically threatening to him, or by offering tacit quid pro quos in his successor regime, and he made no apparent effort to do so.

Zhou Enlai was to Lin's right ideologically, but as a power pragmatist par excellence he would surely have been open to a cooperative working relationship. But Lin seemed to regard Zhou as a threat, and he not only balked at relinquishing control over Zhou's administrative organization but interfered in Zhou's field of special competence, foreign policy. Lin also inhibited reconstruction of the governmental apparatus by delaying, or failing to expedite, the rehabilitation of cadres. Zhou turned to Mao, who issued an injunction (in his speech to the Ninth Congress) to "liberate them without delay," but results were not forthcoming, leading Mao to complain of the situation in December 1969.^[7] Mao was in high

[5] NYT , October 7, 1972, p. 12.

[6] Yao Mingle, The Conspiracy and Death of Lin Biao (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983). Although interesting and not implausible, the mysterious circumstances of its publication make it impossible to corroborate this version.

[7] When Mao saw Snow in December 1970, he made three points: One was an invitation to Nixon to visit China, one was the decision to scale down the cult of personality, the third was the decision to purge Chen Boda. Chen's name was not mentioned, but Mao observed that he was dissatisfied with the results of the Cultural Revolution, that he had been told a lot of "lies" about it. Chen Boda had been chairman of the CCRG. Snow, Long Revolution , p. 174; see also Huo Huisheng, "Chen Boda kuatai yu Mao pai mingyun" [Chen Boda's fall and thefate of the Mao faction], Zhanwang (hereinafter ZW ) (Hong Kong), no. 233 (October 16, 1971): pp. 15–19. Richard Nethercut, "Lin Piao and the Cultural Revolution," University of Hong Kong, Centre of Asian Studies Working Paper, May 1970.

dudgeon (somewhat delayed) about the chaos precipitated by the Cultural Revolution, as he indicated in conversations at the time, and seemed willing to strike any compromise necessary to facilitate rapid economic recovery; he may well have been concerned lest the Cultural Revolution become the sort of economic albatross the Great Leap had been—a catastrophe which, he must have recalled, had placed him on the political defensive for nearly a decade. Zhou's restorationist policies seemed a better bet economically than Lin's low-tech agrarian industrialization; forced to choose, Mao chose the more experienced if conventional Zhou, and the two joined forces at the Second Plenum in an attack against radicalism.

In foreign policy, the available evidence suggests that Lin sought to consolidate his own position by provoking a confrontation with the Soviet Union along the Ussuri.^[8] The first border clash was appropriately timed (a month before the Ninth Congress), and was according to available evidence initiated by Chinese troops; the resulting crisis seemed ideally conceived to foster the sort of "garrison state" mentality most compatible with Lin's preferred style of military radicalism. He used it to justify the imposition of martial law on the exposed northern cities (in the rigors of which Liu Shaoqi expired), and to mobilize the masses to dig air raid tunnels, accumulate grain reserves, and otherwise support the PLA. Yet the escalation of tension along the border was a double-edged sword. While enhancing the functional indispensability of the PLA, it bolstered the argument for withdrawing troops from participation in civilian political organizations so they could return to their units and devote themselves to military training and preparation. It also jeopardized the radical international stance of equidistance between the two superpowers, so exacerbating tension with the one that it became expedient to turn to the other for supplementary deterrence—"Two against one is better than one against two," as Mao later quipped in explaining his opening to the United States. Rapprochement with the West was, however, less compatible with Lin's bureaucratic interests than any conceivable alternative,

[8] This is my own interpretation. Plausible alternative scenarios are explored by Thomas M. Gottlieb, Chinese Foreign Policy Factionalism and the Origins of the Strategic Triangle (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corp., R-1902-NA, November 1977); Kenneth G. Lieberthal, Sino-Soviet Conflict in the 1970s: Its Evolution and Implications for the Strategic Triangle (Santa Monica: RAND Corp., R-2342-NA, July 1978); and Thomas W. Robinson, "The Sino-Soviet Border Dispute: Background, Development, and the March 1969 Clashes," American Political Science Review (hereinafter APSR ), 66, no. 4 (December 1972), pp. 1175–1202; and Harold C. Hinton, The Bear at the Gate: Chinese Policymaking under Soviet Pressure (Stanford: The Hoover Institution Press, 1971).

as it tended to favor the modern urban industrial sector and shore up the moderate forces of archrival Zhou Enlai.^[9]

Lin's position was ideologically compatible with that of the radicals, and indeed at the outset he seemed to have established a useful alliance with Jiang Qing. At a time when Jiang was still persona non grata in Beijing cultural circles, Lin convened a "Forum on Literature and Art in the Armed Forces" in Shanghai under her patronage, and wrote a letter instructing that "from now on, the army's documents concerning literature and art should be sent to her." But further cooperation was complicated by the clash between grassroots radicals and regional military forces that erupted in Wuhan in the summer of 1967. This split the radicals into groups, military and cultural. A brief discursus on the background of this cleavage may be useful.

Jiang Qing provided the nucleus for what became known as the "cultural radicals" (wenge pai ) by assembling a group of relatively young radical literati to help in her reform of Beijing opera after her 1965 hegira to Shanghai, led by Yao Wenyuan and Zhang Chunqiao. Jiang also had a good connection with Kang Sheng, dating back to their common province of origin and to Kang's sponsorship of her Party membership and support of her marriage to Mao (under somewhat awkward circumstances). A second component of the group, however, revolved around Chen Boda, whose entrée was facilitated not by Jiang but by Mao, whom Chen had long served as secretary, editor, and ghost writer. Chen had also worked with Lin Biao, as the main compiler of the quotations from Mao's Selected Works to which Lin wrote an introduction before publishing in analect form.^[10] Chen brought in train a group of Beijing literati with whom he had developed contacts as editor of Red Flag and deputy head of the Academy of Science, including Wang Li (from the Red Flag staff), Mu Xin and Qi Benyu (of the Guangming Daily editorial staff), and Guan Feng, Lin Jie, Lin Bishi, and Wu Zhuanji (all researchers in the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Academy of Science). In May 1966, when Peng Zhen's "Cultural Revolution Group" was disbanded, this rather disparate array of radicals was brought together under the

[9] Evidence that the PLA disagreed with the idea that the United States was no longer as great a danger to China as the Soviet Union may be found in Huang Yongsheng's speech of July 31, 1971. Improved relations with the United States might lead to a reduced military budget, particularly in the areas of ICBM and advanced aircraft development. Lin, "Speech on Mao's Works" (1966), as quoted in Thomas Robinson, A Political-Military Biography of Lin Piao , Part II . 1950 –1971 (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corp., 1971), p. 324. Lin Biao, "Informal Address at Politburo Meeting" (May 18, 1966), as trans. in Martin Ebon, ed., Lin Biao: The Life and Writings of China's New Ruler (New York: Stein & Day, 1970), pp. 253–67.

[10] Claude Julien, "The Lin Biao 'Mystery': Part I. From Promotion to Decline," Le Monde , December 28, 1971, pp. 1, 3; translated in FBIS, January 4, 1972, pp. B1–B5.

chairmanship of Chen Boda and Vice-chairmanship of Jiang Qing (with Zhou Enlai as "adviser") as the "Central Cultural Revolution Small Group" (CCRG). Nominally an ad hoc committee operating under the auspices of the CC, the CCRG's actual power rivaled that of the Politburo during much of the period of spontaneous mobilization.

When radical Red Guards came into conflict with more conservative local military forces in July–August 1967, the CCRG was blamed for having encouraged the young rebels to arm "for self-defense." At this point Jiang Qing scapegoated the Beijing branch of the CCRG. Wang Li, Lin Jie, and Guan Feng were purged one after another in the fall of 1967; Qi Benyu followed in January 1968, a move that forced Red Flag to suspend publication for three months. This clean sweep of Chen Boda's protégés cannot have endeared Jiang to Chen. As the only member of the Politburo Standing Committee without an organizational base, Chen was left in a high but stranded position, and he apparently began to combine forces with military radical Lin Biao. It soon became clear that Lin had ambitions of his own, for which he could use a capable symbol specialist. Official documents have revealed that it was Chen who prepared the first draft of Lin's ill-fated report to the Ninth Party Congress.^[11] Having chosen sides, Chen fell from Mao's grace, as the latter escalated his criticisms of the PLA in November 1969 (Chen made no public speeches or statements after October).

After 1967 Lin seems to have had little use for Jiang Qing and the Shanghai subgroup of the CCRG, whose political interests could be disentangled neither from the Chairman on whose patronage they depended nor from the local antimilitary radicals whose support they still cultivated. Jiang Qing's star reached its zenith in the spring of 1967, when cultural and military radicals were still in coalition. She made frequent (and apparently effective) appearances before Red Guard rallies, and, in May, Red Flag published two of her speeches. After the Wuhan incident in August 1967 she promptly went into eclipse. Only six of the original seventeen CCRG members survived the autumn of 1967, and the vacancies were never restaffed. Following the rustication of Red Guards in the fall of 1968, Lin Biao reportedly obtained Mao's permission to have Jiang curtail her political activities, and her public appearances diminished accordingly. Jiang Qing and her protégés remained notably silent at the Ninth Party Congress, and Lin Biao, in a lengthy review of the Cultural Revolution, attributed even the revolutionary model operas (yangbanxi ) to the "revolutionary masses" without so much as mentioning her name. In August, Lin proceeded to have the operas revised

[11] Jacques Guillermaz, The Chinese Communist Party in Power , 1949 –1976 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press; 1976), pp. 461–68.

"under the direction of the Party CC," again without her involvement; this revision highlighted the role of the Red Army. The CCRG was apparently disbanded at the Ninth Congress, receiving no further mention in print until December 1970. At this point Jiang Qing and her Shanghai protégés reemerged to present a series of soirees to visiting delegations on behalf of the Foreign Ministry^[12] —suggesting that her support was now being solicited by Zhou Enlai in the emerging confrontation with Lin. That the cultural radicals supported Mao and Zhou in this struggle is made clear in the 571 documents, which provided for their assassination.

Successor-incumbent Conflict

Lin had ineptly handled his relations with other major political actors, but he might have weathered this storm had his relationship with the Chairman stood him in good stead. Thus Mao's change of heart was absolutely crucial to Lin's fall. Lin Biao was neither the first nor the last successor Mao would ever designate, but he would prove to be Mao's last chance to pass the scepter to a fellow radical with the requisite "power base" to govern effectively.^[13] In view of the damage to the radical cause and to his own charisma that Mao's second self-reversal would incur, the reasons therefor are worth thoroughly exploring.

One possibility that has been suggested is that Lin simply lacked the personal prerequisites for charismatic leadership. True, Lin was not prepossessing in appearance: slight, short, balding (hence the perennial cap), frail, afraid of sun, valetudinarian, a poor public speaker, he failed to impress the Red Guards to whom he appeared at rallies. He would

[12] The rump CCRG presented evening parties featuring revolutionary Beijing opera performances to delegations from the Communist parties of Albania, North Vietnam, Australia, Burma, Indonesia, and France. But they were held not under the auspices of the CCRG, but on behalf of the Ministry of Culture of the State Council. Dagong Bao (Hong Kong), December 24, 1969, p. 1. In an apparent effort to regularize cultural activities, the State Council formed a "Cultural Group" in August 1971, chaired by veteran cadre Wu De (a CC member, vice-chairman of the Beijing RC and second secretary of the Beijing Party Committee) but including a number of lesser cultural radicals. The membership included Liu Xianquan (CC member, chairman of the Qinghai RC, and first secretary of the Qinghai Party Committee), Shi Shazhua (alternate CC member and deputy director of NCNA), Wang Mantian (vice-chairman of the Tianjin RC and secretary of the Tianjin Party committee), Yu Huiyong (a composer of revolutionary Beijing opera), Di Fucai (member of a government department, of the Beijing RC, and of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries), Huang Houmin (a leading journalist), Wu Yinxian (vice-chairman of the China Photographic Society and vice-president of the Beijing Cinema College), Hao Liang (a singer in revolutionary Beijing opera), and Liu Qingtang (a male ballet dancer). Although Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan often accompanied the group, none were listed as members. Ibid., p. 265.

[13] Dittmer, "Bases of Power," pp. 26–61.

proceed jerkily and uncertainly through a prepared text, his voice hoarse, lacking both resonance and an air of conviction. Possibly because he was aware of these personal limitations, before he emerged as a major figure in the early 1960s he led one of the most reclusive lives of any major Chinese politician. In speeches before a military audience, on the other hand, he is said to have spoken forcibly and directly.^[14] His revolutionary escutcheon was immaculate, his military contributions earning him a reputation as "the greatest tactical genius the communist armies had produced."^[15] Moreover, his usurpation of the heir apparency from a well-established successor designate demonstrated no mean political prowess.

More important than Lin's unimpressive personal demeanor (in what is after all a nonelectoral system) is the fact that he was able to conceive and briefly to execute a salvationary mission. Within a brief tenure he was able to introduce his own distinctive political structure and style of mass mobilization (to be more amply described in chapters 6 and 7). These conformed to Lin's military radical vision, with its strong emphasis on discipline, self-sacrifice, and unconditional obedience—egalitarian with respect to status and material incentives, but hierarchical with respect to power. For Lin all but worshiped power, as he made clear in many writings and statements. In perhaps his most famous speech, delivered in the dawning of the Cultural Revolution, he emphasized its violent under-pinnings: "Struggle is life—if you don't struggle against them, they will struggle against you. . . . if you don't kill them they will kill you." Thus "once they have political power, the . . . working people will have everything. Once they lose it, they will lose everything. Production is undoubtedly the base; however, it relies upon the change, consolidation, and development resulting from the seizure of political power." In another stark passage from the same speech, he tried to place his thoughts in some sort of theoretical context:

Among the areas of the superstructure—ideas, religion, arts, law, and political power, the last is the very center. What is political power? Sun Yat-sen thought it was the management of the affairs of the masses. But he did not understand that political power is an instrument by which one class oppresses the other. . . . Of course, suppression is not the only function of political power . . . [but] suppression is the most essential.^[16]

[14] Nethercut, "Lin Piao."

[15] MacFarquhar, Origins , 2 , p. 244; see also Lee Ngok, "Lin Piao's Military Tactics as Seen in the 115th division," University of Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies Working Paper, April 22, 1970; and Robinson, Biography ; and Liu Yunsun, "The Current and Past of Lin Biao," Zhonggong Yanjiu [Chinese communist studies] (Taipei), vol. 1, no. 1 (January 31, 1967): 61–77.

[16] Lin Biao, "Informal Address," pp. 253–67.

According to Lin's conception of charismatic leadership, power flowed ineluctably from the brilliance of the epoch-making hero-leader. He made his first flattering estimate of Mao's "genius" (tiancai ) as early as September 1962, in his speech to the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth CC. Four years later he repeated it: "Chairman Mao's sayings, works, and revolutionary practice have shown that he is a great proletarian genius. . . . He is unparalleled in the present world. Marx and Engels were geniuses of the nineteenth century; Lenin and Comrade Mao Zedong are the geniuses of the twentieth century."^[17] And, in words that Mao was to recall with bitter irony a few years hence (mocking, however, only the second clause in the sentence, never the first), Lin said that "Every sentence of Chairman Mao's works is a Truth, one single sentence of his surpasses ten thousand of ours." Throughout the 1960s, one may search Lin's public record in vain for any indication that his attitude ever deviated from awestricken sycophancy. "I . . . ask the Chairman for instructions and do everything according to his orders," he related to his colleagues in his speech to the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth CC (upon his elevation to second rank in the Party hierarchy). "I do not interfere with him on major matters nor do I trouble him on minor matters. Sometimes I cannot avoid making mistakes and cannot follow the Chairman's thoughts." Because even he could not always "follow" Mao's thoughts, Lin told the masses, "we must carry out not only those instructions we understand, but also those we fail to understand for the moment, and must try to understand them in the course of carrying them out."^[18] Difficulties in understanding could be circumnavigated by simply memorizing isolated quotations, even entire sections, from his writings, and carrying them out to the letter.^[19] Lin's own exemplary ascent to glory was publicly referred to not as an instance of merit vindicated, but of fealty rewarded: "we should take Vice Chairman Lin Biao as our shining example in always remaining boundlessly loyal to Chairman Mao, to his Thought, and to his proletarian revolutionary line."^[20]

Lin made a concerted attempt to induce the broad masses to share his reverence for Mao Zedong and his Thought, and thereby implicitly also to adopt his conception of leadership. That conception may have emphasized elite-mass equality and reciprocal communication in theory, but in practice it fostered a vast status and power differential. Leaders should command and followers should obey—unconditionally, immediately, respectfully. Obviously, messages could not be expected to percolate up from the masses, but would echo the thoughts of the "genius" at the

[17] Ibid., p. 265.

[18] NCNA, Beijing, January 23, 1968.

[19] Lin Biao, "Speech on Mao's Works" (1966), as quoted in Robinson, Biography , p. 324.

[20] NCNA, January 23, 1968.

helm; because these thoughts were probably too complex for simple people to comprehend, they were reduced to simplified formulas and often reiterated. This emphasis on rote learning and mimesis of heroic models gave to military radicalism a certain ritualistic quality. There were "morning prayers, evening penitences, rallies falling-in, reporting for and quitting work and making duty shifts, buying and selling things, writing letters, making phone calls, even taking meals"—all of which were surrounded by icons of the Chairman, signifying loyalty.^[21] One observer well versed in Western religious traditions perceived the emergence of certain "liturgical forms" designed to reaffirm commitment to a "salvation history." Thus geographical sites associated with the Chairman became shrines from whence visitors would sometimes take a bit of earth or bottle of water as mementos.

It has been reported that the railway station in Tianjin has been converted to a Mao Zedong's Thought lecture hall. All other pictures were removed, all advertisements; a huge statue of Mao and more than one hundred portraits of him were set up, along with three hundred posters and quotations. School children begin their day by wishing Mao a long life and bowing to his portrait.^[22]

Even if we assume for the moment that Lin's professions of loyalty were absolutely sincere, the question arises: can two charismatic leaders coexist? Can there be two suns in the sky? At first Mao seemed to bask in the warm glow of Lin's praise for him, and he publicly embraced his new "closest comrade-in-arms" as he had never embraced another. He joked and laughed with Lin during their joint appearances on Tiananmen, glancing benevolently and paternally over Lin's shoulder at the text as he struggled through a speech.^[23] The two seemed inseparable. In fact, Lin made it a point never to appear in public except in Mao's company (about

[21] Li Yizhe, "Guanyu shehuizhuyi de minzhu yu fazhi" [Concerning socialist democracy and law], Ming Bao Yuekan [Ming Bao monthly], Hong Kong, November 27, 1975, pp. 11–20.

[22] R. L. Whitehead, "Liturgical Developments in China's Revolutionary Religion," China Notes (East Asian Department, National Council of Churches, New York) 7, no. 3 (Summer 1969). A young Red Guard writes of a close encounter with the Chairman in similar terms: "He was gone. All that remained of him was the touch of his hand on the hand of a few who had been lucky enough to get close to him. . . . Those Chairman Mao had touched now became the focus of our fervor. Everyone surged toward them with out-stretched arms in hopes of transferring the sacred touch to their own hands. If you couldn't get close enough for that, then shaking the hand of one who had shaken hands with Our Great Saving Star would have to do. And so it went, down the line, until sometimes hand-shakes were removed as much as one hundred times from the original one, spreading outward in a vast circle like waves in a lake when a meteor crashes into its center." Liang and Shapiro, Son of the Revolution , p. 123.

[23] Nethercut, "Lin Piao."

forty times altogether between the first mass Red Guard rally in August 1966 and the Ninth Party Congress in April 1969), and he was always photographed together with Mao, each time standing a deferential step behind. He also retreated together with Mao for two months or more on half a dozen occasions in the course of the Cultural Revolution. Though Mao later was to claim he found Lin's professions of esteem overweening, during the entire 1962–70 period when the cult of personality had its heyday Mao made no visible attempt to resist it, in fact lending public support to such mass tributes as the Tiananmen parades or the proliferation of Mao Zedong Thought study classes (organized in response to Mao's May 7, 1966, letter to Lin Biao urging the latter to "turn the whole country into a great school of Mao Zedong Thought"). In a 1965 conversation with Edgar Snow, Mao frankly defended the cult in terms of political expedience.^[24] The only indication to the contrary, a letter allegedly written to Mao's wife in June 1966, was not revealed until after Lin's death and there is reason to question its authenticity.^[25]

Sometime during the period from the Ninth Congress to its Second Plenum, Mao reconsidered. This was not merely a question of radical economic policies or even the chief of state position; Lin's entire conception of charismatic leadership he began to find objectionable. In a later conversation with Snow (December 1970) he first publicly indicated that the cult had gone too far and that he wanted it modulated.^[26] In 1971 a campaign was accordingly launched to study the Marxist-Leninist classics, thereby also shifting the emphasis in the rehabilitation of cadres from rote fanaticism to some demonstration of intellectual mastery—with which trained Party cadres may be assumed to have been more comfortable.^[27] The "theory of genius" (tiancailun ) was publicly denounced.

Mao changed his mind about his own cult partly because he sensed that Lin was splitting charisma into two components: a symbolic component, which was the recipient of worshipful awe, and an operational

[24] Jean Vincent, Agence France Presse (hereinafter AFP), Paris, February 11, 1968. Reviewing the meeting of the Shanghai RC in early 1968 at which the experience of the past year was analyzed, Mao said that the organization of the study classes was a good thing; many problems could be settled thereby. Classes to study Mao's thoughts were thus promptly opened everywhere. See NCNA, February 8, 10, 17, 1968; NCNA, Beijing, February 25, 1968. Many of these "study classes" were in fact informally established courts and jails.

[25] The letter, dated June 8, 1966, was first revealed in late 1972. It refers to incidents that demonstrate that it could not have been written before the third week of July, 1966 (in particular, references are made to Mao receiving foreign visitors, which are easy to check). The document probably dates from 1969 or even later. Cheng Huang, "China: Purloined Letter," 78, no. 49 (December 2, 1972): 10–11.

[26] Snow, Long Revolution , pp. 167–77.

[27] Ding Wang, Wang Hongwen Zhang Chunqiao Pingzhuan [Biography of Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao] (Hong Kong: Ming Bao, 1977), pp. 5–6.

component, which defined the mission. This split represents the purely power-oriented aspect of the conflict, and there is no question that Mao was acutely sensitive to it. In the summer of 1969 the formula designating military leadership began to appear: "The PLA, founded by Chairman Mao and directly led by Vice-Chairman Lin." But why can the founder of the army not also be the leader, Mao wondered, so the formula was revised to read: "The PLA, founded and led by Chairman Mao and directly led by Vice-Chairman Lin," and finally (in the draft State Constitution approved by the Second Plenum of the Ninth Congress), Mao was designated "supreme commander of the whole nation and the whole army" with Lin as "deputy supreme commander" of same.^[28] Lin was obviously trying to create a role for himself as Mao's most loyal follower and authoritative exegete, also allowing himself to be ranked among the "three assistants" of geniuses—Engels for Marx, Stalin for Lenin, Lin Biao for Mao—two of whom, it should be noted, duly succeeded their illustrious forebears.

Considerations of power may have been primary, but policy was also involved. In other words, the fact that Mao was unwilling to share his charisma should not obscure the fact that the two men's conceptions of the role of leadership did in fact diverge. The personality cult served a quite different function as a rhetorical justification for emancipation of the "revolutionary masses" from repressive bureaucratic authorities than it did as the dogma of a lock-step military dictatorship. Mao's writings and recorded obiter dicta are too replete with antiauthoritarian, even iconoclastic themes (true, his actions are more mixed) for us to doubt that Lin's conception of power must have been anathema to this erstwhile anarchist.^[29]

Consequences

The impact of the Lin Biao episode (jiu yi san shijian , or September 13 incident, as the Chinese call it) upon charismatic leadership was devastating, not only in the obvious sense that the exaggerated efficacy attributed to Mao's leadership resisted moderation (a "moderately infallible" leader?), but in the doubt cast on Mao's judgment by the rejection (and death) of a second hand-picked successor. It is difficult today to conceive of the shock this misadventure provoked when it was first disclosed to study groups at the end of November 1971. A former soldier recalled:

[28] China Notes (hereinafter CN ) (Hong Kong), no. 380 (October 8, 1970); China News Analysis (hereinafter CNA ) (Hong Kong), no. 777 (October 10, 1969).

[29] See Franklin W. Houn, "Rejection of Blind Obedience as a Traditional Chinese and Maoist Concept," Asian Thought and Society 7, no. 19 (1982): 18–31; and vol. 7, no. 21:264–79, especially pp. 270–73.

We received an order at night to assemble at the ceremonial hall. I had never seen the soldier before who read us the central documents. The meeting was closely guarded. Wherever we went we were watched, even in the restrooms. When I heard the central document I was shocked so much that my heart seemed to leap out, and I could not believe my ears. The meeting lasted for three days. We were not allowed to exchange opinions among ourselves. We were not allowed to leak the contents of the meeting. I dared not tell even my wife.^[30]

One might suppose the waning of charisma to have been at least counterbalanced by some closure of the vast elite-mass hiatus—and so it was. But because this waning resulted from an infraction of Maoist norms, it was taken to imply not that the masses were the true geniuses, but that they were also justified in their violation of those norms. As a former cadre put it:

At the beginning, I think people were very suspicious. Later it had a profound impact, to think that such a person of high position could become counterrevolutionary. It convinced people that Party people were no better than ordinary people. . . . The relations between the PLA and the masses got worse and worse after this, but this had nothing to do with Lin Biao.^[31]

Mao and Zhou

After the disastrous outcome of Mao's second attempt to set premortem succession arrangements, he seems to have decided to postpone the issue until after his death. Finding no single candidate worthy to replace him, he opted for collective succession. A more cynical interpretation would be that he learned from the Lin Biao episode to trust no one, and was hence quick to check any grouping that began to acquire too much power—in other words, that he was actually opting for no succession.

In any case, the post-mortem succession option would prove unsatisfactory for two reasons. First, there was no established procedure for

[30] Male informant, born 1946 in Guangdong, of worker family background, student class status (junior high school graduate), participated in a Red Guard faction during the Cultural Revolution, legally emigrated to Hong Kong in December 1976. Interviewed June 7, 1977 (hereinafter informant no. 14).

[31] Male informant, born 1932 in Guangdong (Taishan), of poor peasant and revolutionary martyr family background, soldier individual class status (having "joined the revolution" when he was thirteen years old). He joined the Party when he was seventeen and was a deputy leader of the CYL, a position equivalent to that of an eighteenth grade cadre. Left China illegally in 1973 because he was afraid he might be prosecuted for committing manslaughter in the course of the Cultural Revolution. Interviewed May 30, 1977 (hereinafter informant no. 19).

post-mortem selection—such a procedure would have necessarily curtailed Mao's input—making postponement so uncertain that all eligible candidates preferred at best to preempt favorable succession arrangements or at worst to forestall such preemption by other candidates. This situation led to recurrent elite infighting, broken by brief periods of tenuous balance. Second, Mao himself (for whatever reason) was vacillatory in his touting of candidates, sometimes seeming to favor one successor, only to reconsider later. The result was continual lurching from one policy line qua succession vehicle to another and back again.

Mao went through a period of withdrawal after Lin's death, retiring from active politics amid rumors of serious illness.^[32] As in the twilight of the Great Leap Forward, he detached himself from domestic politics while playing a more active role in the international arena (e.g., China's admission to the United Nations, the Nixon visit). Between his August–September 1971 tour of the provinces (in order to muster support for his anticipated confrontation with Lin) and the Tenth Party Congress (in September 1973), he made no public speeches and appeared only once before the Chinese people, remaining publicly accessible only to distinguished visitors.^[33] He had allowed himself an unprecedented public intimacy with Lin, and he may have been embarrassed about his complicity in Lin's ill-fated and short-lived rise to eminence, loath to join in public criticism of one so closely linked to a cause to which he was still committed, simply depressed about Lin's death, or all three. In any case, he made no public statement condemning Lin, and not until the Tenth Congress, two years after Lin's death, would Mao even lend his presence to Lin's repudiation.^[34]

In contrast to his previous (1960–65) "retirement," there has never been any question that Mao's withdrawal was voluntary. As Mao himself

[32] According to a Hong Kong report, in 1972, Mao was stricken with Parkinson's Disease, which caused him a great deal of pain and inhibited his muscular control and speech patterns, though not his intelligence. Thereafter he began to receive foreign visitors in his own library, rather than in the Great Hall of the People or elsewhere. Chen Zhihui, "Mao Zedong de jiating beiju" [Mao Zedong's family tragedy], ZM , no. 18 (April 1979): 44–47.

[33] Although he made no public appearances, in 1974 he received twenty-three foreign visitors and up to the end of October 1975 he had received fifteen. CNA , no. 1019 (November 7, 1975).

[34] The so-called three basic principles ("Practice Marxism, not revisionism; unite, don't split; be open and aboveboard, don't intrigue and conspire") quoted three and a half months after Lin's death in reference to Lin, seem to have been first cited in a joint editorial published a month earlier, where they were, however, treated separately and placed in a different sequence. "Zongjie jingyan jiaqiang dang de lingdao" [Sum up experience in strengthening Party leadership], RR , JFJB , HQ , December 1, 1971. In this citation the "three principles" derived respectively from (1) July 1, 1970; (2) "all along" stressed by Mao, at the Seventh Party Congress for example; and (3) 1964. On only the first of these occasions is it remotely possible that the original referent of the phrase was Lin Biao.

put it in a talk to "liberated" cadres above ministerial level in the fall of 1974:

[S]ince then there has been more work, even several ministers can't take care of it, and they always come to me and the premier. So frequently did they request directions from me that I told the premier I was through with it. (Zhou Enlai interrupts: "Whenever I retreat they come to me no more.") In this way they have been doing things by themselves and the accomplishments are great and the works are good."^[35]

And in view of the fact that the post-Lin purge of the Politburo left the Standing Committee with only one active member besides Mao himself,^[36] there is equally little question that Mao was in effect abdicating in favor of Zhou Enlai. In the words of a subsequent Party historian: "Following Lin Biao's death in Ondor Han, Comrade Zhou Enlai, supported by Comrade Mao Zedong, took charge of the work of the Party Central Committee. . . . At the beginning, Comrade Mao Zedong allowed him to do so."^[37] The cultural radicals had split with Lin in advance of his alleged coup attempt, and were now willing to unite with Zhou in a postcrisis joining of ranks. And, inasmuch as they had been almost completely eclipsed by the Lin Biao regime, and the subsequent campaign against Lin tended to have a spillover effect tainting all radicals, Zhou was in turn gracious enough to lend them his sponsorship, giving Jiang Qing frequent occasions to appear for diplomatic functions and apparently taking a benign, avuncular interest in Wang Hongwen upon his debut. Although Jiang Qing's appearances increased, the nature of these appearances indicate that she was for the time being limiting herself to her role as cultural impresario and not yet claiming political omnicompetence.^[38] Now terminally ill, Kang Sheng made a more limited comeback from the Lin Biao imbroglio, replacing Chen Boda as Mao's "expert on theory" (group leader of the Central Theory Small Group) as well as assistant editor of

[35] "Mao's Talk to 'Liberated Cadres' and 'Wuhan Cadres'" (Fall 1974), as translated in IS 11, no. 2 (February 1975): 91–93.

[36] Viz., Zhou Enlai. Of the twenty-five full and alternate Politburo members elected at the Ninth Party Congress, only twelve continued to make regular public appearances after September 1971. Julien, "'Mystery.'"

[37] Liao Gailong, "Historical Experiences," part 2, p. 98.

[38] After August 1971, Jiang began appearing on special cultural occasions, and in certain "special activities in connection with foreign delegations" (hitherto the exclusive domain of State Council members) in company with Zhou or Li Xiannian. Beginning in the fall of 1972, she also began appearing alone, or in the company of her own protégés, Zhang or Yao (as for the exhibition by a Japanese ballet troupe on November 6). At the Tenth Congress, she started appearing at revolutionary Beijing opera performances in the company of highest state visitors. Wolfgang Bartke, "Die politische Profilierung von Chiang Ching," China Aktuell (Hamburg, Institut für Asienkunde), February 1975, pp. 44–46 (hereinafter CA ).

the committee in charge of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong . He also maintained his links with Jiang Qing, authorizing the Central Party School's literary study group to participate in radical criticism campaigns.^[39]

Zhou Enlai, whose visible political activities easily eclipsed those of any other central leader on the scene during this period, emerged as de facto heir apparent and acting chairman. He assumed this role in a far more skillful manner than had Lin Biao, consistently protesting that succession was "collective," attempting to co-opt Jiang Qing and Wang Hongwen, agreeing to a formula that allotted many more CC seats to "mass representatives" than ever before, never evincing the insecurity that had driven Lin to try to arrogate power.

Yet he did take advantage of the momentary power vacuum to try to superimpose his own mission. In the eighteen months following the death of Lin he attempted to resuscitate the engineering approach to continuing revolution, which conceived a positive relationship between economic growth and prosperity and the realization of socialism, sequential and well-organized advance under hierarchical leadership, and so forth. In industry, radical criticisms of "unreasonable rules and regulations" gave way to greater emphasis on cost control procedures and accounting,^[40] individual management of enterprises was again endorsed (as of early 1972), and material incentives made their reappearance under the rubric of "reasonable rewards." In January 1973, provincial and local commerce departments were told that they could vary prices according to product quality, and supply and demand. In agriculture, CC Document (zhongfa ) no. 82 (issued December 1971) established the basis for the so-called New Agricultural Policy, which guaranteed private plots and payment according to work. The model Dazhai brigade was reconstrued to exemplify simply working hard to improve irrigation and the general condition of the fields, not to refer specifically to the more politicized and egalitarian Dazhai workpoint system.^[41] Communes and production brigades could no longer recruit from the production team without its explicit consent. Prices paid for industrial crops were raised in order to provide the material base for light industry, and the prices for agricultural inputs were lowered.^[42] The masses were instructed to distinguish between "grasping revolution for the sake of production" and the reaction-

[39] Ruan Shanqing, "What Role Did Kang Sheng Play in the Great Cultural Revolution?" Dongxiang [Trends] (Hong Kong), no. 18 (March 16, 1980): 25–28 (hereinafter DX ).

[40] Economist Intelligence Unit (Hong Kong), Quarterly Economic Review: China , no. 3 (July 20, 1971), and no. 4 (October 14, 1971). (Hereinafter QER .)

[41] China Topics , YB 594 (August 1974).

[42] Editor, "The PRC Economy in 1973," Current Scene (Hong Kong) 12, no. 3 (March 1974): 1–12.

ary theory of "production first," between economic accounting for the sake of revolution and "profits in command," and other such subtle distinctions. Taking advantage of the thaw in relations with the West (including the visit of Richard Nixon in February 1972) that followed Lin's fall, the PRC purchased large quantities of grain abroad, and in 1973 authorized whole plant imports on a scale greatly exceeding that of the early 1960s.

The radicals were soon discomfited by the thrust of such policies, no less by the "Criticize Revisionism" campaign Zhou used to discredit radical opposition to them. As Mao's nephew and leftist protégé Mao Yuanxin put it in a speech to a Propaganda Work Conference in Liaoning:

Why are there some people who are so interested in the criticism of Lin Biao's ultra-leftist line? I always feel there is a sense of vengeful counterattack. In other words, there has been a small-scale restoration since the criticism of Lin Biao's ultra-leftist line last year. . . . If they continue to carry out this criticism, the next targets to be criticized will be . . . the Great Cultural Revolution and the New Things that have emerged since the Great Cultural Revolution.^[43]

Mao obviously shared their concern, but was somewhat inhibited in his response by an appreciation of Zhou's political utility and by the knowledge (by 1973) that Zhou was stricken with cancer and could place no realistic claim on succession in any case. In view of the damage the Lin Biao misadventure had done to his reputation, he also had to show some concern for his own credibility. Thus he authorized an allegorical criticism campaign against the "Duke of Zhou" (Confucius), but did not permit it to proceed to its logical outcome in Zhou's public exposure and purge, as had the campaigns of 1966–68, apparently intending it rather to serve as a warning (earlier allegations that the Four launched the campaign without his authorization have since been discounted).^[44]

Mao also took a number of other steps during this period, many of them from behind the scenes, to shore up the radical cause. To wit: First, he elevated the young radical Wang Hongwen from a humble position in Shanghai to vice-chairmanship of the Party, apparently intending to

[43] "Liaoning Daily on Sworn Follower, Lin Biao Issue," in FBIS , April 26, 1978, p. L8.

[44] According to Liao Gailong ("Historical Experiences," part 1, p. 98): "Later, he [Mao] became vexed because he [Zhou] restored the correct original line. Thus, Comrade Mao Zedong criticized the resurgence of 'Right' deviationism. Later, he further initiated a struggle to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius, to oppose Comrade Zhou Enlai." A former high cadre (gaoji ganbu ) interviewed in Hong Kong related that when Jiang Qing complained to Mao in 1972 that Zhou was rehabilitating unreconstructed capitalist-roaders and restoring "revisionist" programs and asked permission to criticize him, Mao demurred, explaining that to criticize Zhou would throw the nation into chaos. Why not criticize Confucius, he suggested.

groom him as his successor. In the preparatory meetings prior to the Tenth Congress he disregarded objections and called upon senior colleagues "to elect boldly young people to responsible work posts, to be vice-chairmen of provincial Party committees and the Party's Central Committee; for instance, Wang Hongwen." In his enthusiasm for Wang, who is said to have reminded him of the young and idealistic Mao Zedong, he reportedly even took him into his private residence to live.^[45]

Second, he introduced many of the more radical themes in the "Anti-Lin Biao and Confucius" campaign. Thus the quotation that prompted the revival of mass mobilization in the summer of 1973, "Going against the tide is a Marxist-Leninist principle," first appeared in a People's Daily commentary that Mao apparently ghostwrote.^[46] It was Mao who first noticed Zhang Tiesheng's famous letter in Liaoning Daily (where Mao Yuanxin had published it) protesting the inequity of university entrance exams for sent-down youth, and by having it published in People's Daily he forestalled the reintroduction of college entrance exams, also setting in motion the movement against "taking the back door" (zou houmen ).^[47] (This movement won the applause of the masses but annoyed cadres, eventually inducing Mao to retract his support.) Finally, Mao supported launching the radical Shanghai journal Study and Criticism , initially allowing his calligraphy to be used in the mast-head, and there is also evidence that he made occasional pseudonymous contributions.^[48]

The Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius (pi-Lin pi-Kong )

[45] Takashi Ito, "Politics and the People," Kyodo (Tokyo), August 15, 1977; trans. in FBIS , August 19, 1977.

[46] China News Service (hereinafter CNS ), no. 485 (September 20, 1973); Yan Jingwen, "Beijing quanli douzheng jinru xin gaochao" [Beijing's power struggle advances to a new high tide], ZW , no. 283 (November 16, 1973): 6–9. The quotation first appeared in a signed commentary in RR on August 16, 1973, p. 3, under the name Yang Bu—possibly a pseudonym, since no leading official in Beijing is known by that name. This call for rebellion against the "current" was issued only two days before the seventh anniversary of the Red Guard movement.

[47] Xu Zhuanfu, "'Pi Lin zhengfeng' jitui 'fan chaoliu'" ['Anti-Lin movement' fends off 'against the current'], Zhanwang [Prospect] (Hong Kong) no. 284 (December 12, 1973: 5–8. (Hereinafter ZW .) Although the Zhang Tiesheng incident was publicized in Liaoning Ribao on July 19, RR did not publish it until August 10, and if Mao had not personally requested it, it might never have been published. As in the June–July 1966 situation, the campaign seems to have been stalemated prior to Mao's intercession.

[48] Xuexi yu Pipan published an editorial under the pseudonym Fang Hai in every issue. In the December 16, 1973, issue, for example, Fang Hai wrote a passage without quotation marks on the ideological reform of the intellectuals. Two weeks later, the New Year's Day message of the pacemaking "two papers and one magazine" (liang bao yi kan —Renmin Ribao , Jiefangjun Bao , and Hongqi ) attributed an identical passage to Mao. This suggests either that "Fang Hai" was Mao's penname, or at least that Fang's writings had Mao's blessing. CNS , no. 504 (February 14, 1974).

however proved not only difficult to implement but had little evident deterrent effect on Zhou's rightward drift. Zhou Enlai retired to the hospital on the evening of May 9, 1974 (where he continued to receive frequent visitors), having installed Deng Xiaoping as acting premier and heir apparent. This was a clear public signal of Zhou's retirement from successorship, and the relationship between Mao and Zhou henceforth assumed the character of a contest among incumbents to designate the successor. Zhou seems to have gone about setting the stage for his succession far more deliberately than Mao. He stepped up the rehabilitation of veteran cadres and proceeded to make appointments to complete the staffing of his administrative hierarchy in the fall of 1974, expecting to ratify these formally at the forthcoming Fourth NPC. Meanwhile, the struggle to define the mission continued, and potential successors played an increasingly active role in this, perceiving in the mission a vehicle through which they might rise to charismatic leadership.

The climactic confrontation between the flagging incumbents, each still championing his own respective vision of the salvationary mission, erupted in the first half of 1975. Zhou emerged from his hospital to chair the Fourth NPC, where skeletal plans were presented for a massive modernization project that would see the nation through to the twenty-first century. Perhaps beginning to lose his tactical finesse at this point, Zhou failed to co-opt the radicals into this project, in fact all but freezing them out. Mao launched an almost immediate alternative in the Campaign to Study Proletarian Dictatorship, whose evident purpose was to offer a theoretically definitive elucidation of the distinction between the "proletarian revolutionary line" and the "bourgeois reactionary line" or "capitalist road" that he perceived to be still coexisting within the same leadership, making it feasible to attack the latter without collateral damage to the former. Yet the distinction he and his radical colleagues were attempting to draw failed theoretically (e.g., see the inconsistency between Yao Wenyuan's emphasis on ideological leadership and Zhang Chunqiao's focus on the different economic bases of the two lines) as well as practically, giving rise to another round of internecine factionalism. The radicals proved unequal to the task of pacifying the situation, leaving the field, perforce, to the moderates.

The Passage of Power

The final period was one of increasingly complex and intense struggle: its complexity is due to the fact that it involved continuing conflict among incumbents to designate their successors, inter-successor conflict to discredit rivals and retain favor, and finally conflict between incumbents and successors as Mao sought in effect to pursue a "null-succession" option and keep all would-be successors at bay. Its intensity was due to the fact

that Mao was obviously at death's door. Underlying these frantic political conflicts and to some extent a consequence of them was a waning of charisma, as Mao Zedong finally abandoned the attempt to define a salvationary mission, and as Zhou's rival attempt to do so withered in the face of radical polemics.

Inter-incumbent Conflict

Following Mao's implicit repudiation of his Four Modernizations program in the drive against bourgeois right, Zhou seems to have with-drawn from the political scene; he had retired to the hospital as early as May 1974, but in view of the fact that he continued to entertain visitors and to pursue such elaborate political projects as restaffing his State Council and arranging for the NPC, the radicals considered this something of a tactical ruse.^[49] Now, however, he seems to have lapsed into political inactivity, leaving his affairs in the hands of the blunt and energetic Deng Xiaoping, whose positions as first vice-premier and acting premier gave him strong claim to Zhou's mantle.

Zhou's selection of Deng as his successor, however, also tended to bias the selection of Mao's successor in Deng's favor. The reason is that inasmuch as Zhou was senior vice-chairman of the Party as well as premier, whoever succeeded him would also be favorably situated to succeed Mao himself. The choice was limited to the three surviving vice-chairmen: Ye Jianying, Wang Hongwen, and Deng Xiaoping. But Ye was too old to come under serious consideration, and Wang had fallen from favor due to his handling of the Hangzhou incident (to be explicated in chapter 6). Thus Deng Xiaoping, as first vice-premier and sole eligible vice-chairman, stood on the threshold of total power. And just before his death on January 8, according to rumors reaching Hong Kong, Zhou left a "last will" endorsing Deng.

Zhou's plans were, however, undone by the timing and sequence of the retirements of strategic members of the older generation. At Zhou's behest, Deng delivered the eulogy at the premier's memorial service on January 15 on behalf of the CC, the State Council, and the PLA, and the text was published in all newspapers throughout the country and read repeatedly over all national and provincial broadcasting stations on January 15 and 16; a television recording of the latter half of the speech was also released for nationwide distribution on January 16.^[50] Mean-

[49] "Although Premier Zhou is seriously ill, he is 'busy' finding people to talk with," Wang Hongwen allegedly complained to Mao. "Those who often visited the Premier's residence include comrades such as Deng Xiaoping, Ye Jianying and Li Xiannian." Central Document (CD) no. 24 (1976), as translated in IS 13, no. 9 (September 1977): 80–110.

[50] N.B.: Deng made no reference in this speech to "stability and unity" (anding tuanjie ), or even to "stability"—terms for which he had come under attack by the radicals. But he also omitted reference to the campaign against the Rightist reversal of verdicts that the radicals were promoting.

while, the Politburo promptly deadlocked over Zhou's succession. That his own death should have preceded Mao's was obviously inopportune, as it gave Mao the chance to override Zhou's succession arrangements (it seems not to have occurred to Zhou to retire before his own death). With Zhou, Kang Sheng, and Dong Biwu now dead, both Zhu De and Liu Bocheng mortally ill, and six of the remaining members absent because their main work lay in the provinces, the radicals were able, with Mao's concurrence, to block Deng's selection. Roughly half the votes went to Deng and the other half to Zhang Chunqiao, second vice-premier and the radical choice. Hua Guofeng, a dark horse with relatively little experience at the national level, emerged as the compromise candidate.

On February 7 it was announced that Hua had been appointed acting premier and CC vice-chairman. When Deng was purged of "all offices inside and outside the Party" on April 7 in the wake of the Tiananmen Incident, Hua was appointed premier and first vice-chairman of the Party, placing him next in line to Mao. In view of later developments Hua is assumed also to have been groomed by Zhou, as a contingency selection. It is also true, however, that the radicals made no overtures to the new heir apparent, as they would have done had Mao made his wishes clear; on the contrary, they attempted to implicate him as a "capitulationist."

Inter-successor Conflict

The potential successors, having after all a greater stake in succession than the incumbents, were inclined to preempt the process without quarter or scruple. As Mao and Zhou faded from the scene they began to seize the initiative, constructing factional networks (to be described in greater detail in chapter 7) to defend their respective positions. Considerations of balance were no longer evident in the staffing decisions for the Fourth NPC, and in the ensuing period the escalation in conflict could be gauged not only by increasing mutual exclusion,^[51] but by the fact that the two potential successor organizations no longer respected each other's spheres of functional specialization: the radicals attacked moderate management of the economy, and the moderates attacked radical management of the propaganda and culture organs.^[52]

Successor-incumbent Conflict

Whereas Zhou's presence was no longer apparent after the summer of 1975, Mao continued to operate from behind the scenes. He tended,

[51] "They have already labelled us the 'Shanghai Gang,'" complained Zhang Chunqiao. "In a certain reception for foreign guests, they intentionally arrange us in a group. At that time I told the premier my opinion of it." Reported by Xu Jingxian on November 29, 1976, and quoted in CD no. 37, trans. in IS 15, no. 2 (February 1979), pp. 94–111.

[52] See CD no. 24, pp. 79–112; CD no. 37 (1977), pp. 94–111.

however, to abandon ambitious ideological innovations and adopt reflexive, balance-of-power tactics, shifting support unpredictably from one side to the other. He faulted the radicals for factionalism (a number of his criticisms have subsequently been published by the moderates),^[53] apparently blamed them (fairly or unfairly) for the failure of the Campaign to Study Proletarian Dictatorship, and sided with Deng in his critique of their administration of culture.^[54] He sharply reprimanded Jiang Qing for her attempt to turn the Water Margin campaign (to be described in chapter 6) to political account.

By the fall of 1975, as a result of the radicals' own tactical blunders as well as Mao's disenchantment, cultural radicalism had reached its nadir. Throughout the summer the media were bereft of the themes repeated everywhere in the spring: the "new-born things," the Xiaojinzhuang model, the revolutionary operas. Rehabilitation of purged veterans (e.g., Yang Chengwu, Luo Ruiqing) reached a "high tide" in July–September 1975. The moderate offensive against the radicals seemed to have been successful on all fronts. Then, suddenly, their fortunes turned. The radicals themselves attributed their salvation to the Chairman's providential intervention: on December 30 People's Daily published a letter from a group of graduating Qinghua University students, claiming that the "big debate over the revolution" that followed the "rightist wind for the reversal of verdicts" in July, August, and September had been launched by a "series of great instructions that came directly from Mao at the key moment."^[55]

In fact it is hard to account for such a reversal except by the Chairman's personal intercession. What brought this change of heart? One reason is that certain signals aroused all his old suspicions that the moderates were in fact "anti-Mao" (one of the few words Mao bothered to learn in English), and that the radical "new things" upon which he had after all staked his reputation would not survive a moderate succession. The first such signal came in the form of a request approved by Deng and Education Minister Zhou Rongxin from Qinghua University President (and Party Committee Vice-Chairman) Liu Bing in August for the dismissal of Chi Qun and Xie Jingyi. These two were of a somewhat different origin from the Shanghai group: Chi was an officer in the 8341 elite guard assigned to Mao, and Xie the daughter of Xie Fuzhi, Mao's chief of secret police (following Kang Sheng's retirement). Mao thus considered Liu Bing's letter an ill-concealed attempt to attack Mao himself, and he wrote a letter back in which he placed the incident in the context of the struggle

[53] Jiang Qing's letter to Mao of November 19, 1974, as quoted in CD no. 24, complains that she has been "neglected and given almost no work."

[54] Mao allegedly expressed his approval in talks with Deng in early July, and in a written statement on July 14, as quoted in CD no. 37.

[55] CNS , no. 596 (December 31, 1975).

between the two classes and the two roads. Mao's letter was promptly published by the grateful radicals, setting off criticism of the impending education "rectification" promised by Deng and Zhou Rongxin.^[56]

Another such signal was contained in an address by Deng Xiaoping to a State banquet for National Day on October 1, in which he quoted the Chairman as saying: "The entire people must continue to follow the important instructions of Mao Zedong: to study the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to struggle against revisionism, and to take care to promote stability and unity and to further national economic development."^[57] Although Deng did not identify the original citation, on the same day that the speech was published another lead article in People's Daily also attributed the three commands to Mao.^[58] Fruitless attempts to track down this "three-point directive" suggest, however, that Deng was exercising liberal poetic license.^[59] On January 1, having apparently only recently become cognizant of the matter, Mao sharply repudiated Deng's directive: "What? Stability and unity does not mean giving up class struggle! Class struggle is the key link, upon which everything else depends."^[60] Both of these incidents indicated to Mao that, as he presciently noted of Deng later that winter, "he said he would never reverse the verdict. It cannot be counted on."^[61]

A second possible reason for Mao's fateful change of heart is more personal, having to do with the Chairman's deteriorating health. There is ample testimony that the Chairman retained full command of his mental faculties until the end, but continual pain and physical disability (for example, he could no longer read) prevented him from attending formal meetings and made him increasingly dependent upon those close to him.^[62] As of 1973, Mao's wife seemed to have lost this proximity as a result of personal incompatibility, taking up residence in the official guest

[56] See Wang Xizhe's remarks in Qishi Niandai , no. 2 (February 1981): 20–23.

[57] RR , October 1, 1975, p. 2.

[58] Ibid.

[59] The directive was not attributed to Mao in provincial broadcasts or articles, and none of the articles later quoting it printed it in the customary boldface type. It was not included in the Mao quotations on National Day and has never been printed in Mao-quotation form before or since. CNS , no. 597 (January 7, 1976).

[60] Mao's repudiation is prominently quoted in the New Year's joint editorial of RR , HQ , JFJB (January 1, 1976).

[61] RR , March 28, 1976.

[62] According to a member of the Schmidt delegation, which met with Mao in December 1975, "Mao cannot rise from his chair with his own strength. He moves his arms with difficulty, he cannot fully close his mouth, his voice is broken, and the articulation of every word creates considerable difficulty for him. . . . There is however consensus that the illness of the 82-year-old Chairman says nothing negative about his mental [geistliche ] abilities. Mao Zedong follows what goes on around him with alertness." Rudiger Machetzki, in CA , December 1975, pp. 767–770.

house. Zhou retained direct access to Mao until he was personally incapacitated in the fall of 1975. For a while Mao was close to Wang Hongwen, but when Wang fell from favor in May 1975 he retreated to Shanghai. Then in the fall of 1975 Jiang Qing regained access by recalling Mao Yuanxin from Liaoning to serve as secretary of her personal office. Mao Yuanxin, a nephew who had been raised in Mao Zedong's house-hold after his father was killed by the warlord Sheng Shicai, had managed to stay in Mao's good graces. At this point he seems to have reinforced his uncle's radical impulses, perhaps by subtly nuancing the information he related about the outside world. As the Chairman's health further declined, Jiang Qing also regained access to him.

Yet the Chairman remained ambivalent to the end. Having rescued the radicals from political oblivion, he watched as they tried to press their advantage, scrambling to a position of dominance second only to Hua and Mao in the new Politburo (upon Deng's "retirement" in February)—and then dropped them from favor. When Hua and Jiang presented Mao with alternative scenarios for the campaign against Deng, Mao opted for Hua's more moderate plan. Deng's errors represented a "contradiction among the people," and neither Deng nor those who had supported his 1975 modernization plans should be purged. Jiang made speeches on February 23 and March 2 advocating a harder line, but to no avail.^[63] Mao is said to have asked Ye to persuade Deng to submit another self-criticism, but even after lengthy discussion the latter refused, saying he had always tried to act according to the center and Chairman Mao; the errors he had committed in the past he had long since given up (jiaodaiguo ), so he was not thinking of writing another self-criticism.^[64] When at the end of March the radicals arranged to hold an expanded meeting of the Politburo to criticize Deng, inviting their supporters at Qinghua and Beijing universities, Deng remained silent and seemingly indifferent throughout the meeting. Upon its conclusion his only response to the criticisms was "My ears are deaf, I could not hear well" (ting bu qingchu ).^[65] Deng had apparently arrived at the shrewd tactical estimate that he was sure to outlive Mao and prevail over the hated radicals in the long run in any case, so there was no need to stoop to another self-criticism.

Although the radicals eventually succeeded in bringing Deng down by holding him responsible for the Tiananmen Incident, they could not plausibly claim to have regained Mao's favor for the succession. Hua's competing claim is stronger, but clouded by the attendant circumstances:

[63] "In China there is an international capitalist agent named Deng Xiaoping," Jiang claimed in one of her speeches. "It might be correct to call him a traitor. Nevertheless, our Chairman has been protecting him." CD no. 24.

[64] Zhang Changxi, in ZW , no. 338 (March 1, 1976):4.

[65] Zhou Xun et al., Deng Xiaoping (Hong Kong: Guangjiaojing Pub., 1979).

Hua was reporting to Mao on the progress of the anti-Deng campaign on April 30, whereupon the Chairman, his speech impeded, responded with a written directive containing these three instructions: (1) take your time, don't be anxious; (2) act according to past principles; and (3) with you in charge, I am at ease. "If you have any questions, ask Jiang Qing," he added (according to Jiang Qing, in a later interpolation). According to the best evidence so far available, Mao explicitly designated no successor.

Lost Mission

Upon the collapse of the "bourgeois right" campaign, Mao seems to have given up attempts at theoretical clarification of the revolutionary mission, resigning this task to future generations, and his terminal statements on this question even suggest pessimism about the capability of his successors to rise to the occasion. On December 31, Mao met with the Nixon delegation, revealing in an interview with Nixon's daughter Julie a despair over the political proclivities of China's youth reminiscent of his mood on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. "Young people are soft. They have to be reminded of the need for struggle," he told her.

Mao had rated the chance of permanent success of his revolution less than fifty percent. The Chairman told us, there will be struggle in the Party, there will be struggle between classes, nothing is certain except struggle. . . . it is quite possible the struggle will last for two or three hundred years.^[66]

His last public instructions appeared in an article by the editorial departments of People's Daily , Red Flag , and Liberation Army Daily on May 16, which quoted him attacking "high officials" and calling upon the masses to rise up against them. On June 1 he convoked a group of Politburo colleagues (viz., Hua Guofeng, Wang Hongwen, Ye Jianying, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Li Xiannian, and Chen Yonggui) for what were to prove his last (apocryphal) recorded remarks. In these he gave voice to feelings of persecution and doom, characterizing himself as "the target of everyone, an isolated poor old man standing alone." While foreseeing the possibility that "in China a restoration of the bourgeoisie would occur everywhere," this would only be a temporary setback, and "in a few decades, centuries, at the latest a few ten thousand years, the red banners will again wave everywhere."^[67]

After a series of natural disasters of the type that traditionally augur dynastic changes in China, Mao passed away on September 9, 1976, at

[66] Julie Nixon Eisenhower, in Ladies's Home Journal , January 1976, as quoted in The Hong Kong Standard , December 27, 1976, p. 9.

[67] Quoted in CA , November 1976, p. 581.

12:11 A.M. , at the age of eighty-two.^[68] Although in retrospect his charisma would seem to have so ebbed that he could neither transfer it to a chosen successor nor protect his own reputation from posthumous abuse, this was by no means clear at the time. The evidence at hand was ambiguous. On the one hand, he seemed ultimately triumphant: his "latest instructions" could override constitutional law, his obiter dicta were tantamount to Central Documents. The inordinate significance attached to two "forgery" episodes in the last year of Mao's life—the first of which resulted in the dismissal of Deng Xiaoping, the second (a quibble over whether Mao had told Hua to follow "past" principles or "principles laid down") in the arrest of the Gang of Four—demonstrated the authoritative character ascribed to his every word. On the other hand, compliance sometimes seemed ritualistic, an impatient charade masking self-interested behavior.

Succession arrangements remained unclear for about a month, during which both sides engaged in negotiation and backstage scheming. The underlying basis of cleavage was obviously the issue of succession, and the lack of a solution suggested a deadlock. Apparently Jiang sought the position of Party Chairman for herself, with Hua relinquishing his premiership to Zhang Chunqiao (rumors and wall posters had predicted such appointments some three weeks after Mao's death).^[69] As of Mao's death Jiang probably counted on the support of Chen Yonggui and Ji Dengkui, plus the four charter members of the "Gang." Of the ten remaining Politburo members, the moderates could probably rely on another six (Ye Jianying, Xu Shiyou, Liu Bocheng, Chen Xilian, Li Xiannian, and Wei Guoqing), leaving four "swing" votes (viz., Hua Guofeng, Li Desheng, Wang Dongxing, and Wu De). It is not clear that a vote was actually taken prior to October 6 but it is reasonable to suppose so, nominating Hua as the most plausible candidate for chairman even before the traditional forty-day period of mourning had elapsed as a way of winning over the undecideds and forcing the Four to their reserves. Chen Yonggui and Ji Dengkui had served under Hua as vice-premiers for the preceding six months, hence their ideological loyalties to the Four were placed under organizational cross-pressure. Hua's nomination flushed out the opposition of the Four (Jiang called him "incompetent"), who

[68] In 1976 the PRC was hit by seven earthquakes, affecting Hebei, Yunnan, Sichuan, and Gansu provinces and the major cities of Beijing and Tianjin. The worst of these occurred in Tangshan on July 28. It measured 8.2 on the Richter scale and reportedly claimed 655,337 lives and injured another 800,000, making it China's worst since 1556. SCMP , January 5 and 6, 1976.

[69] Leo Goodstadt, China's Watergate: Political and Economic Conflicts , 1969 –1977 (New Delhi: Vikas Pub., 1979), pp. 4–12.

proposed Vice-Chairman Wang Hongwen as an alternative. They succeeded in blocking Hua on the first ballot, but after a heated discussion he was elected during a second meeting. Having placed the Four under close (reportedly including electronic) surveillance (Hua had functioned concurrently as Minister of Public Security since January 1975), the moderates were now in a position to move swiftly at the slightest sign of "illegal" activity in resistance to the majority decision, which was not long in emerging.

How elaborate or effective such conspiratorial activities were is hard to gauge.^[70] Though there is little credible evidence of a radical plot to launch a coup and seize power on a national scale, there was some effort to organize local resistance in Shanghai—all of which came to naught upon the announcement of the arrest of the Four on October 6.^[71] On the morning of October 7, a meeting of the Politburo was held at which leaders of the moderate faction read reports on the arrest, and the Politburo unanimously supported Hua's decision and elected him chairman of the CC. On October 8, the new Politburo announced its first two decisions: to establish a memorial hall in Beijing to house the corpse of Mao Zedong (in violation of Mao's personal wishes), and to publish volume 5 of Mao's Selected Works (Hua accepted chairmanship of both the building committee and the editorial board). The Politburo report announcing the arrest was meanwhile secretly circulated nationwide to middle and high ranking cadres.^[72]

The political repercussions of the arrest seem to have been quite widespread, belying Hua's claim that the issue had been drawn "without firing a single shot or shedding a drop of blood." Serious disturbances erupted in Fujian, necessitating the presence of PLA troops to maintain order; chaos was also reported in such provinces as Jiangxi, Hubei, and Hebei. Although Fujian is the only province in which the PLA was ordered to intervene, radio broadcasts spoke of "civil war" in Sichuan, and "beating, smashing, and looting" were reported from northern Shandong in the November 1976–May 1977 period, southern Jiangxi,

[70] Jiang Qing apparently contacted Mao Yuanxin, political commissar of the Shenyang MR, to request support from his division in Beijing (the reason being that the "8341 troop" was said to be preparing to help the reactionaries stage a coup), but Yuanxin needed the approval of Li Desheng, commander of the MR, to give the troops marching orders, and Li in turn consulted with Vice Chief of Staff Yang Chengwu in Beijing, who informed Hua and other high functionaries of Mao Yuanxin's request. This report is impossible to corroborate. Certainly continuation of the campaign to criticize Deng would have provided the radicals with ample opportunity to embarrass and perhaps even purge members of the moderate group.

[71] See Ronald Suleski, "Changing the Guard in Shanghai," AS 17, no. 9 (September 1977): 886–98.

[72] Ming Bao (Hong Kong), October 28, 1976, p. 1.

Guizhou, and Baoding (a railroad center 110 miles southwest of Beijing). In fact, newscasts and commentaries reported damage in twenty-one of the twenty-nine administrative units in the country.^[73] There was little indication, however, whether such unrest was recent or whether the reports referred to chronic troubles, and it was also unclear to what extent disorder could be attributed to organized resistance by loyal followers of the Four and to what extent to crimes of opportunity during a transitional lapse of central authority.

Conclusion

Charismatic leadership in Chinese political culture is associated with a religiously derived conception of infallibility difficult to approximate in any case, but the Cultural Revolution raised popular expectations of an immaculate sun-god that it proved impossible to sustain. There was also a contradiction between seeking to preserve the charisma of the incumbent and making effective provision to transfer charisma to a successor. One of the tactics Mao used to try to avoid incurring blame for errors without altogether giving up the boldly experimental approach he required to redefine his mission was to retreat to the "backstage" while engaging emissaries to act on his behalf (and accept blame if the experiment failed). Nevertheless, the Chairman's responsibility for the steep rise and fall of Lin Biao proved inescapable, and his failure to purge the radicals he had so frequently chastised was unaccountable unless one assumes some complicity. The myth of infallibility was also incompatible with the snakelike oscillations of the Party line during the late Cultural Revolution period, which owed as much to Mao's own ambivalence as to changing objective circumstances. Paradoxically, a man who loved to ignore balance and forge blindly and one-sidedly ahead proved during his last years to be such an accomplished weaver and bobber that the charismatic mission he had hoped to instill was almost completely obscured.

The attempt to translate charisma into a set of impersonal doctrines that could be transmitted from one leadership to another also proved unfeasible. There are at least two reasons for the failure to codify charisma: first, fear of expropriation of the code to serve the power-political interests of those intrinsically hostile to Mao or his Thought; second, uncertainty about the policy content of the code, requiring continual tactical readjustment in light of political and economic exigencies. Thus the exact content of the code could never crystalize. Nor did the code serve the maintenance and enhancement needs of China's dominant political or-

[73] SCMP , January 1, 1977, p. 4; November 29, 1976, p. 4; January 1, 1977, p. 1; October 17, 1976, p. 3; Domes, Government , p. 140.

ganizations, who might otherwise have had an interest in its perpetuation—quite the contrary!

All of which is to explain how the transmission of charisma was complicated by the problems—both inherent and idiosyncratic—of the donor. But there were also problems on the side of the potential recipients. Generally speaking, for a would-be successor to demonstrate the self-assurance, imagination, and communicative skills that constitute the subjective dimension of charisma would be to risk coming into conflict with the incumbent leadership. Thus any aspirant to charismatic succession would probably tend to mask such qualities. Even after taking such discretion into account, however, it is difficult to find candidates on the scene who demonstrated much potential.

Lin Biao, diminutive, sickly, and unprepossessing as he appeared, at least had a brilliant military record of which something might have been made, and his decision to launch a preemptive coup against Mao showed audacity in conception if not in execution. He did have a power base that was deep if not particularly broad, and some of his writings (particularly his essay on people's war) exhibit theoretical imagination and an innovative capability. But he continued to allow his thinking to be so dominated by militaristic attitudes that he seemed incapable of operating within the more fluid and compromising milieu of civilian politics. Lin's charisma implicitly assumed the impassioned motivation generated by revolution or war; in a peacetime context, he proved incapable of mobilizing the masses—only of regimenting them. The civilian populace for its part seemed relieved to be delivered from his Draconian regime.

The cultural radicals were "court favorites" without broad or deep power bases or any outstanding achievements to speak of. Their spectacular political ascent could be attributed almost entirely to Mao's personal power. Liege to a jealous lord who customarily bade them undertake tasks apt to estrange them from everyone else, they found it impossible to broaden their base. Even had circumstances been more auspicious, the Four lacked the political qualities to claim charismatic leadership. Wang held promise but was inexperienced, overshadowed by Zhang and paralyzed by the rigors of Cultural Revolution politics. Yao was solely a wordsmith, a "pen" (bi ). Zhang, in addition to possessing what was probably the keenest theoretical intellect of all potential successors, had considerable political skill, as he demonstrated during the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai. At his trial, he demonstrated at least the courage of dignified silence. But he never ventured to emerge from the shadow of Jiang Qing to strike out on his own; his consistent willingness to subordinate himself to her showed poor political judgment. As for Jiang, she was a resourceful innovator in the artistic realm, contributing to the politicization of drama and to the melodramatization of politics. She had the

courage of her convictions and an indomitable will, but she was a fanatic, inclined to appeal only to true believers. Apparently unversed in theory, shrill and splenetic, Jiang fit all the Chinese negative female stereotypes too well to overcome deeply ingrained prejudice against women in politics.

Among the available contenders, only Zhou Enlai was at all qualified to fill the subjective criteria for charismatic leadership. A politician of great charm and acumen, he conceived in the end a visionary program capable of appealing to the interests of China's officialdom. But never did he venture to create his own political language, preferring to manipulate the words of others—even his culminating "Four Modernizations" he owed to Mao. And not once did Zhou dare to assert himself beyond the bounds of prudence for what he believed in. It is a sad commentary that this great nemesis of the Gang of Four also chaired the committee that brought trumped-up charges against Liu Shaoqi.

An informative controversy has arisen within the comparative communist literature concerning the character of the succession crisis, to which the events related in this chapter might profitably be related. At issue is whether the succession crisis magnifies or mitigates the leadership's capacity for policy innovation. Rush has contended that such a crisis tends to freeze the innovative capacity of the system, for such decisions beg the unresolved question of who is to decide them.^[74] Bunce argues on the contrary that such crises stimulate political innovation, as fledgling successors endeavor to consolidate their regime with policies calculated to appeal to a new constituency.^[75] The relevance to the above discussion is obvious: without an innovative mission, charismatic succession is impossible.

The Chinese experience suggests that one crucial and hitherto neglected factor concerns the phase in the development of the succession crisis at which conflict breaks out. Both Rush and Bunce are basically oriented to a post-mortem succession scenario. But the Chinese case suggests that a "succession crisis" in Rush's sense of a paralysis of will is apt to begin well before death of the incumbent. During the pre-mortem phase, there are conflicts of interest not only between potential successors, but between incumbents and their designated successors. Both Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao made anticipatory bids to define an innovative mission, which excited Mao's suspicions of betrayal, and he rescinded his choice. Mao's subsequent refusal to select a successor fostered a stable balance of power between heirs apparent, in which no one was in a strong

[74] Myron Rush, Political Succession in the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965); and How Communist States Change Their Rulers (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974).

[75] Valerie Bunce, Do New Leaders Make a Difference? Executive Succession and Public Policy under Capitalism and Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

enough position to approve and implement imaginative new policies. Instead of elite pluralism, an immobilisme was generated characteristic of coalition cabinets in multiparty parliamentary systems.

The period most hospitable to policy innovation seems to be immediately after a winner emerges from a post-mortem showdown. During this period, the emergent successor must attract a bureaucratic constituency and assemble a mass base, if one is to survive. To do this, policies must be introduced promising (and hopefully delivering) a dramatic improvement in popular fortunes. This is so even if that winner proves to be only transitional, as in the case of Hua Guofeng (or, in comparative communist terms, Malenkov, Nagy, or Dubcek^[*] . Only after a successor has fully consolidated control over the administrative apparatus and cultivated a base is it possible to dispense with policy innovation and rely more heavily on the coercion of dissent.