Six—
Permanent Mobilization

A "revised storming" approach was adopted toward mass mobilization during the late Cultural Revolution. This represented a continuation of the storming approach insofar as mobilization was still considered a valued end in itself and not just a means to redistribute property, to boost economic production, or to pursue other ends. Only through continuous mobilization, it was felt, could a revolutionary transformation of the cultural superstructure be achieved. It ("revised" storming) differed primarily in its fluctuating but generally enhanced concern for organizational integrity, and in its clearer recognition of the sensitivity of the relationship between mobilization and economic production. Yet both of these shifts came reluctantly and somewhat half-heartedly, succeeding neither in stabilizing a favorable economic climate nor in sustaining revolutionary enthusiasm among the broad masses. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the reasons for this failure.

The chapter is divided into two parts. The first deals with the political economy of mobilization: the causal relationship between mobilization and production. The second examines the impact of mobilization upon cultural transformation, its main objective. As the deepening factional cleavage became articulated with a functional division between economic and ideological bureaucracies, the political economy and the moral economy of mobilization grew incommensurable.

Political Economy

Throughout the post-Liberation epoch, the relationship between mobilization and economics has had two aspects: as a dependent variable ("effect"), mobilization presumes the provision of material incentives sufficient (in combination with normative incentives) to motivate the masses to participate—which in turn assumes an adequate level of economic production. As an independent variable ("cause"), mobilization has been aimed at stimulating more intense, zealous efforts at increasing production. These two aspects of mobilization are interdependent in the

sense that without an increase in production it becomes uneconomic to provide the masses with increased material incentives, and without mobilization it becomes more difficult to increase production. Political considerations may temporarily override this interdependency: it is possible to mobilize the masses with enhanced material incentives in the absence of increased production through deficit financing, for example, or to increase production without enhanced material incentives by more heavily emphasizing normative or coercive incentives. But over the long term, such alternatives are not economically cost-efficient and hence are unlikely to be sustained.

Let us first focus on mobilization as a dependent variable. During roughly its first decade, the regime maintained a positive correlation between mass participation and enhanced material incentives. The base from which these improvements were measured had been artificially lowered for many sectors of the population by years of protracted warfare, economic instability, and cumulative deterioration of public goods (e.g., the transportation and communication infrastructure, irrigation and waterworks, forestry). By seizing uncontested national sovereignty for the first time since 1911 and vigorously launching a series of political and economic reforms, the regime was able to arrest these tendencies. Economic recovery and growth ensued, providing an expanding "pie" from which workers and peasants could receive larger shares. Many of the movements launched during this period were redistributive in nature, resulting in the transfer of fungible assets (such as land) from the former ruling classes to the working classes.

With the completion of the socialization of the means of production at the end of 1956, the cheapest source of material incentives to allocate among mass participants had been exhausted. Redistributive movements were not yet abandoned—the Great Leap resulted in the redistribution of property through the merging of cooperatives into People's Communes, for example, and there were periodic experiments with different workpoint allocation systems or shifts of responsibility for collective property from one administrative level to another—but because of the alienation of control over property from masses to cadres, none of these redistributions resulted in perceived enhancement of material incentives, and some of them resulted in perceived deprivations.

Nor did increases in production, which, with the exception of the Great Leap, were generally strong—sometimes excellent in the industrial sector, less impressive but still positive after discounting population growth in the agricultural sector—result in an enhancement of material incentives for the working classes. After 1963 there was a remarkable period of nominal wage stability (and de facto attrition) in the modern urban sector that was to last until 1977. The only significant wage

hike, in 1971–72, applied only to people who had been on the bottom two rungs of the wage ladder for extended periods. Agricultural incentives are more difficult to measure in view of the incommensurability of workpoints in various regions and various other problems peculiar to this sector, but the best available estimates indicate a similar stagnation of living standards.

The Cultural Revolution represents a continuation of this trend toward stable or even slightly declining material incentives accompanied by extremely high rates of capital investment, steadily increasing economic growth, and declining rates of productivity. Normative incentives were no longer reinforced by material incentives, but rather used to rationalize their absence. Thus the themes of selflessness and altruistic sacrifice for the collective ran like a red thread through the entire Cultural Revolution decade, justifying continued struggle (labor) in the absence of any particular material benefit therefor. Benefits would be accumulated not in heaven but by future generations on earth, from the enhanced productivity that cumulative collective investment would facilitate.

Although increased production should therefore in principle not be correlated with material incentives, there was certainly a prospect of linking normatively motivated mobilization to increases in production. The most concerted effort along these lines seems to have been made during Lin Biao's tenure. The need for economic recovery and resumed growth in the late–Cultural Revolution period was not the liability for Lin that it was to prove for the cultural radicals, for his emphasis on austerity, discipline, and collective morale, and his reassertion of a tight, militaristic organizational framework, could readily be put to constructive account. In fact, the Cultural Revolution gave the first major new impetus to the construction of locally financed, "small-scale" factories in the rural areas since the Great Leap.^[1] The emphasis was on "small and comprehensive" units (capable of turning out all kinds of industrial products, both heavy and light), using indigenous methods and native equipment. Direction of small industrial and agricultural enterprises was given to the commune, that of middle enterprises to the xian , that of the large operations to the province; the intermediary echelons—the commune and the administrative region—functioned to verify the actions of those directly subordinate to them. Before the Cultural Revolution, only a few provinces could turn out equipment for small nitrogenous fertilizer plants in complete sets, but afterward a large number of provinces could do so, with the result that by 1968 the productive capacity of such plants

[1] For planning and statistical purposes, these are factories that "employ sixteen or fewer people and use mechanical power, or 31 or fewer and do not use mechanical power." Independent power plants are "small-scale if their generating capacity is less than fifteen kilowatts, regardless of the number of employees." CN , no. 325 (August 21, 1969).

constituted more than a third of the country's total capacity for nitrogenous fertilizer production, increasing to 40 percent in 1970 and 60 percent in 1971.^[2] By 1970 more than twenty provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions had set up manual tractor plants, small machine industries and various types of plants for the manufacture of farming implements and spare parts. About 90 percent of the counties throughout the country (96 percent by 1971) were said to have their own "factories" for the repair of farming implements and machines; small iron and steel plants, small coal mines and pits, small cement plants (which by 1971 turned out more than 40 percent of national cement production), small hydroelectric power stations, and small chemical works also mushroomed across the country. There were vast labor-intensive projects to construct waterworks, drainage, and irrigation (as in the Huai-Hai Valley); or to extend the infrastructure of communication and transportation (as in the construction of roads and bridges). The large oil fields began operating at Dagang off the Hebei coast, and at Shengli off the Gulf of Bohai. Self-sufficiency was emphasized, with Dazhai and Daqing serving as models of development without state support.^[3]

A major radical initiative was also launched in the agricultural sector under the apparent auspices of Lin Biao and Chen Boda. Partly to counter spontaneous capitalist tendencies that had cropped up in the countryside during the lapse of central control, partly for ideological reasons, there was a tendency to encourage the shift of the unit of accounting from the production team to the brigade or commune, to discourage material incentives in favor of some accounting of political attitudes, and to put pressure on private plots.^[4] Thus the size of communes seems to have increased significantly in the late 1960s (the total number of communes being reduced from some seventy-five thousand to fifty-four thousand). In Shanghai municipality, the stronghold of the cultural radicals (who probably collaborated with Lin on this issue), 34.2 percent of the total collective assets on the communes were held at the commune level and only 15.1 percent at the brigade level.^[5]

[2] CN , no. 325 (August 21, 1969).

[3] Marianne Bastid and Jean-Luc Domenach, "De la Revolution culturelle à la critique de Confucius: L'evolution de la politique interieure chinoise, 1969–1974," in Claude Aubert et al., eds., Regards froids sur la Chine (Paris: Seuil, 1976), pp. 126–72.

[4] CNA , no. 712 (June 14, 1968); Union Research Service (hereinafter URS ) 57, no. 14 (November 18, 1969): 174; 58, no. 23 (March 20, 1970): 323; 59, no. 5 (April 17, 1970): 58. See also Jürgen Domes, China after the Cultural Revolution: Politics between Two Party Congresses , trans. Annette Berg and David Goodman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 611–77; and David Zweig, "Agrarian Radicalism in China, 1968–1978: The Search for a Social Base (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1983).

[5] Bill Brugger, "Rural Policy," in Brugger, ed., China since the "Gang of Four " (London: Croom Helm, 1980), pp. 135–73.

The radical program for ideologically motivated labor-intensive investment encountered difficulties when Lin Biao's star went into eclipse in mid-1970. The peasants manifested passive resistance to such policies as centralized administration within the commune or the reduction of private plots.^[6] In industry, radical investment priorities came under reconsideration in mid-1970, as China began preparations for its Fourth FYP (to be launched in 1971). Under cover of the 1970–71 critique of "ultraleftism," Zhou and his supporters reemphasized central economic priorities, including the need to adhere to central planning, observe cost-accounting procedures, and introduce comprehensive rationality ("one chessboard") to what otherwise threatened to become a "cellularized" patchwork of self-sufficient economic units. The proliferation of investment in small-scale plants utilizing indigenous technology lacked overall coordination, ignored economies of scale and comparative advantage, and tended to divert investment funds from the capital-intensive modern sector in the cities, where little new capital construction had occurred since 1966. The new emphasis on the large-scale urban industrial sector thus coincided with a wave of imports, including "turnkey" plants for the production of chemical fertilizers, synthetic textiles, and petro-chemicals.^[7] This shift of emphasis presupposed a more rapid rehabilitation of cadres, who in effect monopolized the requisite technical and managerial competence.^[8] Needless to say, the rehabilitation of cadres also enhanced the political position of Zhou Enlai.

Despite this setback, radical industrialization strategy survived the fall of Lin Biao, under the putative patronage of Mao and the Gang of Four. Any reemphasis of the modern urban industrial sector necessitated the introduction of new equipment and technology, which implied an opening to the West (in view of the Sino-Soviet vendetta), making China hostage to international market vicissitudes, possible bourgeois cultural spillover, and loss of "self-reliance"—industrial imports would continue, but sporadically, amid controversy. Thus a rift opened between

[6] Leo Goodstadt, "Purifying Profit," FEER 73, no. 38 (September 18, 1971):7–8; Henry S. Bradsher, "China: The Radical Offensive," AS 13, no. 11 (November 1973): 989–1001.

[7] Colina MacDougall, "Walking the Rustic Tightrope," FEER , vol. 67, no. 10 (March 5, 1970): 46–49; and MacDougall, "Another Backyard Boom," FEER , vol. 67, no. 12 (March 19, 1970): 27–28; Goodstadt, "China," pp. 20–25; Kojima Reiitsu, "Accumulation, Technology, and China's Economic Development," in Mark Selden and Victor Lippit, eds., The Transition to Socialism in China (Armonk, N. Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1982), pp. 238–66.

[8] Liberated cadres comprised 84 percent of all factory cadres in Bengbu, Anhui; 27 of 36 in three production brigades in a Shandong commune; over 90 percent at the Hua'nan Colliery; 21 of the 28 cadres at the Changsha Meat Processing Factory; 95 percent of the scientific and technical cadres at the Changjiang Metallurgical Works; and 100 percent of the cadres in the Hangzhou Electrochemical Works. CN , no. 315 (June 12, 1969); see also CN , no. 311 (May 8, 1969).

the "two legs" of Chinese industry, with the small-scale indigenous sector continuing to grow rapidly, large-scale heavy industry languishing, or lurching ahead between strikes and critical assaults. Steel had an average annual growth rate of only 2.8 percent between 1970 and 1976, coal 6.2 percent; by contrast, chemical fertilizer grew 12.2 percent, electric power 10.3 percent, crude oil production (led by the radical Daqing brigade) 19.7 percent.^[9] Although the resulting sectoral imbalance would lead to the import surge of 1977–78, the small-scale rural industrial sector survived the fall of the radicals intact, thanks to local political backing and an inadequate transportation infrastructure.

After the fall of Lin Biao, the campaigns of the Cultural Revolution decade became engrossed in cultural issues, generally avoiding new initiatives in the eonomic sector. An important exception was the campaign against "bourgeois rights" in the spring of 1975. Launched less than three weeks after the Fourth NPC, which it was obviously designed to upstage, it resulted in the publication of Mao's first "latest instruction" and in the first signed theoretical articles by high-ranking cadres (namely, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan) since the late 1960s. The argument was that the central question that had precipitated the Cultural Revolution in the first place—was China moving toward socialism or back toward capitalism?—had yet to be resolved. The basic reason for back-sliding tendencies, it was now stated more clearly than ever before, was not residual formations from prerevolutionary society but emergent revisionist tendencies, or "new bourgeois elements." Class was no longer defined solely in terms of ownership relations; Mao followed Lenin in contending that the relations of production included two other factors—mutual relations among people and the pattern of distribution—any combination of which might affect class status. Inasmuch as "bourgeois rights" (faquan ) continued to exist in socialist society, proletarian dictatorship was still necessary in order to restrict them. And what were bourgeois rights? On February 22, People's Daily published three pages of quotations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin, introduced by a joint editorial note from People's Daily and Red Flag , to clarify this issue. The note pointed out, again quoting Mao, that "in our country today there is a commodity system [shangpin zhidu ], the wage system is unequal, there is an eight-grade wage system, and so on." Zhang Chunqiao's April 1 article went on to identify the peasants and other collectively organized workers as "small producers" (in connection with which Mao had said, quoting Lenin, that small production engenders capitalism continuously).

As the first radical attempt since the 1960s to set forth positive alternative economic proposals, the campaign generated considerable interest,

[9] See Leslie Evans, China after Mao (New York: Monad Press, 1978), table 4, p. 61.

for both its general thrust and certain provisions were dissonant with the program of the Fourth NPC, which it nominally affirmed. The new State Constitution guaranteed the three-grade ownership system, "individual labor of nonagricultural individual laborers within limits permitted by law and under the unified direction of the street organizations in the towns and cities, and of production teams in the villages." Article Nine stated that "the state protects the citizens' right to ownership of their income from work, their savings, their houses, and their means of livelihood." The draft plans (though not the Constitution) reportedly also included provision for a general wage increase.^[10] Thus the Constitution and other NPC documents explicitly provided for "bourgeois rights," whereas the statements of Mao and his ideological comrades-in-arms indicated that they were seeds of capitalism. The critique of bourgeois rights regarded any wage increase to be potentially indicative of "special privilege," and not only successfully advocated a rescission of the contemplated wage increases but gave rise to short-lived attempts (in February) to abrogate all bonuses (which had been sanctioned for workers on the bottom two rungs of the wage ladder in late 1971) and introduce "Saturday voluntary labor." A move was afoot to consider a basic reform of the eight-grade wage system hitherto standard in all state enterprises.^[11] Some of the campaign polemics suggested Maoist reservations about agricultural incentive systems as well, and scattered prohibition of peasants' sideline production or confiscation of private plots was reported.^[12]

Considerable controversy arose, amid voluntary initiatives to actualize radical economic injunctions prematurely and popular resistance to these initiatives. No explicit change in official policies encouraging radical activism was announced by either central or provincial authorities, leaving activists in limbo about what reforms were implied by the radical critique.^[13] The effect was to give everyone a sense of bad faith about current economic practices without requiring anyone to rectify them.

[10] A CD inviting proposals for a revision of wages and work grades was reportedly circulated among Party and government cadres at the end of February 1975.

[11] Reform of the wage system would have entailed raising the first grade and lowering the eighth, but doing so reportedly foundered on the opposition of Deng Xiaoping, who opposed lowering the top grade until a higher economic level could be attained. The attempt to encourage voluntary overtime also drew little support. Only Henan province is known to have launched a movement in March for factory workers to carry out voluntary labor for limited periods on workdays; the movement seems to have been short-lived. References from Shanghai and Beijing factories and Liaoning coal mines, among others, betokened an effort to revive it in November 1975.

[12] CNS , no. 599 (January 21, 1976). See also Zweig, "Agrarian Radicalism," which shows how leftist intervention in the villages varied with time and location and in impact.

[13] As an RR editorial noted, "As to systems which involve economic policies, [we must] seriously carry out investigation and study, and take a cautious attitude." "Grasp Theoretical Study, Promote Industrial Production," RR , March 11, 1975.

Shanxi Radio thus reported that a production brigade in Baoji County was a progressive unit, but that

in the course of study some comrades had a muddled understanding of the question of the relationship between the transformation of small production and reliance on the poor and lower-middle peasants. They separated transformation of small production from reliance on poor and lower-middle peasants and set the former against the latter. They held that the poor and lower-middle peasants had been relied on in the previous political movements but that this time was different and it was necessary to transform small production.^[14]

Inasmuch as the campaign was apparently intended only to prepare the way for communist ideals without yet adjuring the masses to adopt them, it gave rise to considerable confusion. Guangdong Radio reported two types of "wavering": one type is "only seeing the inevitability of the existence of bourgeois rights in the current stage without seeing that they must be restricted, even expanding them." The other is "only seeing that the mentality of bourgeois rights must be destroyed without seeing that it is essential resolutely to implement the Party's policies in the current stage, and arbitrarily changing the Party's rural policies."^[15] The ultimate impact of this theoretically ambitious campaign was merely to forestall moderate wage increases, thereby further detaching the radicals from any realistic relationship to current economic difficulties.

What was the impact of mobilization as an independent variable, or "cause"? Largely due to radical influence, not only was mobilization no longer employed to stimulate production, but the latter came to be regarded with a distinctly jaundiced eye; the ultimate result was a negative trade-off between production and mobilization. The radicals affirmed the proposition that revolution necessarily contributed to production, but having asserted it in the abstract they demonstrated little evident concern with establishing its truth in practice; in fact, they displayed a consistent suspicion of those who paid too much attention to production, regarding such people as potential dupes of "economism."

The chief reason for this fateful disengagement of mobilization from production has to do with the structural fragmentation to be discussed in the following chapter, in the course of which the mobilizational apparatus fell under the sway of the radical faction and the apparatus of economic planning and management came under exclusive moderate control. Once factional responsibility for these two different functional sectors had been established, the objectives and inherent logic of the contest between them

[14] Shanxi Radio, August 18, 1975; see also Radio Sichuan, September 3, 1975, first published in RR on August 28.

[15] Guangdong Radio, September 4, 1975.

became clear. To the extent that the economy prospered, the moderate claim to functional indispensability would be enhanced, for they alone could claim competence to manage the economy. But it did not necessarily follow that any decline in economic production redounded to the advantage of the radicals. There are actually two variables, the economic conjuncture and the degree of radical interference in economic production, whose interaction is graphically depicted in figure 3.

Figure 3
Economic Correlates of Mobilization

The moderates stand to gain most during periods of expansion, as in contingency 3, although radical activism (contingency 1) might then also be more easily tolerated. Contingency 2, high radical activism during economic recession, is apt to trigger a classic scapegoating reaction. Only if radicals remain quiescent during a period of recession are they then favorably positioned to mount an effective attack on the moderates without risk of becoming scapegoats.

The Lin Biao period, from 1968 to 1971, fits most easily into contingency 1. This was a period of simultaneous economic expansion and radical activism, in the course of which the moderates gradually recovered control over the economy. The period of the antiradical Criticism of Lin Biao campaign, in 1972–73, on the other hand, fits contingency 4. Zhou Enlai and his State Council now had uncontested sway over the economy, while the radicals remained relatively quiescent. But growth during 1972 failed to match targets over a wide area and was well below the gain recorded the previous year.^[16] Part of the reason for the slowdown was adverse weather conditions, which damaged commune

[16] Growth in the combined gross value of industrial and agricultural production probably did not exceed 5 percent, though precise figures are unavailable. This gain is only half the figure officially claimed for the previous year and probably smaller than at any time since 1967. The year 1972 saw an actual fall in the output of food grains and a number of other agricultural products. QER , no. 2 (March 13, 1973).

enterprises and forced a shift of resources from industry to agriculture; the more fiscally prudent attitude toward small-scale industry may have also had a short-term contractive effect, as many smaller and less productive units were shut down in an effort to improve efficiency.

Thus by the end of 1972 the economy may have become something of a millstone around the necks of the moderates, perhaps contributing to Mao's decision to unleash the radicals in the spring of 1973. Fortunately, the economy simultaneously made an impressive recovery (the estimated gross value of industrial output rose from 9 percent in 1972 to 11 percent in 1973). This recovery implied a shift from moderate scapegoating (contingency 4, from January to September 1973) back to moderate gains and radical toleration (contingency 1, from October to December 1973). Economic expansion could tolerate radical mobilization only up to a certain point, however, before it began to be adversely affected. In the first four months of 1974 the radicals made the economy a major issue, criticizing management for neglecting ideology in pursuit of economic objectives (particularly the distribution of material rewards of various types). This shift was apparently authorized by the Chairman himself. On May 5, Mao said: "I see nothing wrong with posting big-character posters in the streets even if the foreigners want to read them, and certainly not if the Chinese want to read them. If the masses get angry, let them give vent to their anger, and if things get too bad we can clean them up later."^[17]

In mid-May, the CC accordingly issued Central Document (CD) no. 18, which permitted posters to be displayed publicly and stripped cadres of their immunity from being criticized by name. There is not much evidence that this directive had much impact in the villages; in the cities, however, a flood of grievances resulted, protesting against arbitrary arrests, police brutality, and widespread torture of prisoners, along with corruption among officials, an inadequate health service, poor safety conditions in factories, and inadequate compensation for victims of work-related accidents. Local and provincial officials came under attack, particularly still-incumbent military politicians.^[18] Many workers and peasants began traveling to Beijing to post their posters on the wall opposite the

[17] Quoted in Wang En, "Yijiuqisi nian zhonggong zhengju yanbian tedian" [Characteristics of Chinese Communist political developments in 1974], ZW , no. 311 (January 16, 1975): 9–11.

[18] Regional targets included MR commanders Li Desheng in Shenyang, Zeng Siyu in Ji'nan, Han Xianchu in Lanzhou, and Ding Sheng in Nanjing. Among those at the provincial level and above who were attacked by name were thirty-five military cadres, seven MR commanders, six MD commanders, and nine first secretaries of provincial Party committees and concurrent RC chairmen. Hua Guofeng was sharply criticized (twenty posters appeared in Beijing on June 16) for his record in Hunan by writers who were so well-informed that they must have come from that province.

door of the municipal Party committee on Wangfujing Street, in hopes of bringing national attention to their plight. Violence was reported in Guangzhou and elsewhere between rival groups of armed youth and the urban militia. The poster campaign in Beijing reached its acme on June 28 with more than fifty new posters, most of them aimed at local cadres' abuse of power and suppression of the mass movement.^[19]

In apparent response to radical mobilizational disruption, industrial production declined precipitously.^[20] By the summer of 1974 the agricultural outlook was also bleak.^[21] No connection between these two developments was publicly admitted, for a balance was still being maintained between the two factions at the central level; nevertheless, it seems clear from the shift in campaign tactics in the summer of 1974 that such a connection was recognized. Jiang Qing is said to have objected to the notion that "the people regard food as the first requisite, so when revolution and production are in conflict the grasp of revolution should be somewhat slackened, and in calamities where agricultural production cannot catch up revolutionary movement should be postponed"^[22] —but she apparently complied nonetheless.

By early 1975, as radical mobilizational activity subsided, the economic situation simultaneously deteriorated, once again favorably positioning the radicals for a mobilizational offensive (contingency 4). By 1975 it was no longer plausible to blame a recession on destruction wrought during the Criticism of Lin Biao and Confucius, and the rad-

[19] Senior members of the Beijing municipal RC (Jia Ding, Yang Shaoshan, Chen Shuhuai) came under fire for stifling mass enthusiasm and turning the RC into a "dead body"—all but one of the twenty-four mass representatives appointed to that body in 1967 had been edged out as "extremists," it was pointed out, and no full committee meeting had been held in four years. Wang En, "Dazibao shengji shuoming le shemma?" [What does the promotion of big-character posters indicate?], ZW , no. 299 (July 16, 1974):9–11.

[20] The campaign adversely affected production in at least two ways. The rallies, meetings, forums, and study courses must have exacted millions of work hours, even had all participants limited their involvement to formally sanctioned activities. But factional conflict also diverted workers from their jobs and led them either to participate or to stay home in order to avoid getting involved. See for example the report in RR , October 11, 1974, as cited in CNS , no. 546 (December 4, 1974).

[21] According to newspaper reports, China's 1973 winter wheat crop was damaged by rains, and production dropped appreciably. At the same time, the large Soviet grain purchase precipitated the sharpest rise in food prices in twenty-two years, amounting to an increase of more than 20 percent by the end of the year (and nearly doubling world prices for wheat and soybeans). The following year saw a further drop in grain production. All of which meant that China had to incur greater costs to compensate for her own shortfall. See Dittmer, "The World Food Problem: A Political Analysis," in Gerald and Lou Ann Garvey, eds., International Resource Flows (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1977), pp. 21–36.

[22] "Jiang Qing's Letter to the Delegates Attending the CCP CC All-China Conference on Professional Work in Agriculture" (July 1975), trans. in IS 11, no. 10 (October 1975): 86–87.

icals successfully characterized it as the fiscal hangover of a massive (moderate) buying spree. China's economic position in the early 1970s had made a cogent case for an increase in foreign trade, from the perspective of the moderates, while the opening to the United States (and attendant lifting of the blockade) now made it for the first time politically feasible. Total trade had been no higher in 1970 than in 1959, while GNP had almost doubled. The abandoned Soviet projects were now coming on stream, so China had the capacity to absorb new industrial projects. Certain industries had either developed bottlenecks, or had the potential for rapid growth if an injection of advanced technology were available.^[23] Thus the moderates sharply increased total trade in the early 1970s, particularly imports. Between 1970 and 1975 the growth in trade was 27.26 percent in money terms, about 9 percent in real terms. By late 1974, China had absorbed $2 billion (U.S.) in foreign machinery and technology (including more than thirty complete plants) in less than two years, and more than three thousand foreign technicians and advisers were present in China.

But in the fall of 1973 oil price increases triggered a worldwide "stagflation" that increased the prices of China's imports while reducing demand for her exports. Beijing ran a deficit of some $566 million in 1973, increasing to $1.27 billion the following year, despite a decline in the purchase of large-scale capital goods.^[24] This was China's largest trade deficit since 1949; in every year from 1954 to 1974 China had held a favorable trade balance with the rest of the world. According to some estimates, China's foreign exchange reserves were reduced from around $400 million in 1972 to virtually nothing in 1975.^[25] Moreover, despite the relative stability achieved in 1972–73, the growth rates realized in the immediate wake of the Cultural Revolution could not be sustained, and the rate of increase in productivity had slowed markedly by 1975. But economically appropriate measures to raise productivity (e.g., capital investment in modern urban plants) threatened to widen the gap between worker and peasant salaries, between city and countryside.^[26] By early 1975 these developments had culminated in a combination of elite disenchantment and recrimination over moderate economic policies and mass discontent over wage freezes.

In their campaign to study the dictatorship of the proletariat and criticize "bourgeois rights," the radicals were able to exploit these dis-

[23] QER , quarterly report no. 1 (March 6, 1975); and no. 3 (August 19, 1975).

[24] Christopher Howe, China's Economy: A Basic Guide (New York: Basic Books, 1978), pp. 135–38.

[25] John F. Copper, "The Rise and Fall of Teng Hsiao-p'ing," Asian Affairs 4, no. 3 (January/February 1977): 184–96.

[26] Bonavia, FEER 95, no. 4 (January 28, 1977): 8–9.

contents to a limited extent. Partly due to radical criticisms, Sino-American trade was curtailed in 1975 by 50 percent, and the trade deficit was reduced by 35 percent. The radicals were ideologically inhibited from dealing rationally with wage inequities, however, and liable to intimidate the moderates from doing so as well. Their pursuit of mobilization in the context of discontent over wages ironically allowed wage grievances to become conflated with radical polemics, causing mobilization in certain industrial areas to degenerate into strikes and factional violence. Thus the railroads suffered a decline in total activity during the first quarter of 1975, and in the second quarter industrial output also declined. Contingency 4 underwent a permutation to contingency 2, and the radicals (with obvious reluctance) temporarily curtailed their mobilizational efforts in the early summer of 1975.

Hitherto the central policy process had remained responsive to negative feedback even though the ideological split overlapped with a division of responsibilities between economic and mobilizational functional realms; now, as the senior leaders who had previously arbitrated the allocation of blame faded from the scene and the succession struggle intensified, this responsiveness was lost. Thus, in the final year, mobilizational activities against the "Three Poisonous Weeds" (i.e., Four Modernizations) were pursued relentlessly despite the fact that the radicals as well as the moderates had lost control of mobilizational activities. Thus economic disruption was exacerbated at a time when it could be least easily afforded in view of the Hebei earthquake and an overall economic slump. Again mobilization became a cover for strikes, slowdowns, factional violence, and similar tactics, as every attempt to increase production came under suspicion as a possible manifestation of the "theory of productive forces."^[27] The Chinese estimated a shortfall of 40 percent for plan quotas in 1976 (roughly corroborated by Western sources), for an annual GNP growth rate ranging from a mere 3 to 3.5 percent (with agricultural growth remaining below 2 percent, industrial growth estimated between 4 and 5 percent).^[28] Although China's trade balance continued to improve, in fact accumulating a record $1.2 billion surplus in 1976, the domestic budget deficit amounted to about $5 billion (also a record).

Radical mobilizational efforts had neither enhanced economic production nor had they contributed to capital accumulation, as might have been more consistent with the radical ideological position. In the absence of any clearly stipulated positive economic objectives and with a persistent tendency to focus criticism on those responsible for the economy,

[27] CA , December 1976, pp. 671–88.

[28] M. D. Fletcher, "Industrial Relations in China: The New Line," Pacific Affairs 52, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 78–95; QER , no. 1 (March 31, 1977).

mobilization ultimately tended to degenerate into vandalism. Although mobilization would continue through the summer of 1976, this did not betoken support for radical economic policies so much as an opportunistic venting of economic grievances.

Cultural Transformation

Participation in mass mobilization was intended to contribute to what Mao called the "transformation of people."^[29] Three dimensions of such a transformation may be analytically distinguished: cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral. The cognitive dimension refers to beliefs about how the world is constituted; the attitudinal dimension to relatively enduring predispositions and to the norms and values on which these are premised; the behavioral dimension to everyday practices. Post hoc interviews revealed considerable change in each dimension, though not necessarily in the direction intended by the leadership.

Cognitive Change

The cognitive impact of three different stages of mobilization will be examined separately: the (early) Cultural Revolution, the Criticism of Lin Biao and Confucius, and the late-Cultural Revolution movements (namely, "bourgeois rights," Water Margin , Criticism of Deng).

The thematic impact of the Cultural Revolution, as noted in the conclusion to chapter 4, was to persuade participants that revisionism was implicit in the nation's developmental pattern as it had hitherto proceeded and that "struggle" was necessary if this course were to be altered. Revisionism was clearly understood to mean bureaucratic authoritarianism and increasing stratification between mental and manual workers and between town and countryside, and a focus on economic growth, raising living standards, and material welfare at the expense of revolutionary values. Our informants generally accepted the truth of these themes, as well as the personal equation of revisionism with Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and the other "capitalist-roaders" (though as cadre rehabilitation accelerated in the course of the late Cultural Revolution, blame became increasingly circumscribed to Liu). But radical attempts in the late Cultural Revolution period to augment and elaborate upon these themes appear to have been much less successful.

The Criticism of Lin Biao and Confucius campaign seems to have failed either to establish an equation between Lin Biao and Confucius or to convince people of the depravity of the latter. The attempt to establish an equation between Lin Biao and Confucius may have been obfuscated

[29] Mao, "Concluding Remarks," pp. 90–100.

by the concurrent Aesopian attempt by the radicals to establish an equation between Confucius and Zhou Enlai, but in any case neither equation was widely accepted. Lin Biao was a more unequivocally negative reference point than the historically remote Confucius, even (if memory served these informants correctly) before news of his coup plot became public. Lin was "very stupid" (da bendan, da caobao ), and there was "no comparison" (mei fa bi de ) with the learned sage of yore.^[30] In the case of Zhou Enlai, on the other hand, the analogy was vitiated by the positive regard in which the Premier was still held (except by admirers of Confucius).^[31]

Attempts to denigrate the reputation of Confucius seem also to have failed, oddly enough in view of the fact that such criticism has been a facet of cultural modernity in China since the May Fourth movement.^[32] Whereas all informants understood the values and principles that Confucius represented, these were not held in disesteem. For the young he was no more than an object of mild curiosity. For the older generation he continued to exact deference or at most qualified reproof.^[33] Whether this reservoir of goodwill for the sage represents some underlying continuity of values or simply cultural nationalism could not be determined.

The Campaign to Study the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (or Criticism of Bourgeois Rights), the Criticism of Water Margin , and other campaigns during what was to prove the radicals' swan song were least successful of all in penetrating the masses' cognitions, to judge from our informants' responses. The basic thrust of these campaigns represented

[30] Representative of the former is the former cadre who revealed that although he wrote a big-character poster during the Criticism of Lin Biao and Confucius, he criticized only Lin Biao but not Confucius, "because I greatly respect Confucius." Informant no. 17. Representative of the more qualified position is the former central cadre who said: "His teachings were bad, too authoritarian. Worst of all is the doctrine of the li [lijiao ]. But his respect for learning is good." Informant no. 37.

[31] "Lin Biao has always been bad," contended a former Red Guard. "He was a fascist. He used only a suppressive method to change people's thinking." Informant no. 25.

[32] See Kam Louie, Critiques of Confucius in Contemporary China (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1980); Tien-wei Wu, Lin Biao and the Gang of Four: Counter-Confucianism in Historical and Intellectual Perspective (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983); and, of course, Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968 ed.).

[33] "I only know that Confucius was a great sage [da shengren ] and a great educator who made a very great contribution to Chinese civilization," said a former kindergarten teacher. "This impression can never be changed." Informant no. 20. See also male informant, born 1944 in Guangdong, of lower-middle peasant family background, student individual class status, former CYL cadre, deputy secretary of the CYL general branch, and a member of the Standing Committee of the local RC during the Cultural Revolution. He worked in the headquarters of an enterprise engaged in construction of a hydroelectric power station. Emigrated to Hong Kong illegally because of "political problems" in 1972. Interviewed June 6, 1977 (hereinafter informant no. 13).

continuity with early Cultural Revolution themes, emphasizing egalitarianism and self-sacrifice (in the case of bourgeois rights) and fidelity to revolutionary values (in the Water Margin and Anti-Rightist Reversal of Just Verdicts campaigns), but the campaigns were more subtly argued, perhaps presupposing greater popular familiarity with Marxist texts and Chinese literature than proved warranted. In any case, a majority of these informants had no correct conception of bourgeois rights, which they diversely misconstrued as "the power of convention," "selfishness," "dictatorship," "class differentiation," and whatnot.^[34] The confusion that greeted the campaign to study Water Margin is perhaps understandable in view of the fact that Jiang Qing herself may have misconstrued Mao's intentions, but in any case most of our informants were baffled by Mao's sudden repudiation of the popular hero Song Jiang and did not know who he was supposed to represent on the contemporary political scene.^[35]

Attitudinal Change

Two of the most distinctive aspects of the Cultural Revolution as a form of mass attitudinal change (besides its emphasis on "struggle," that is,

[34] "Bourgeois rights are non-democratic, dictatorship. . . . They don't allow others to oppose them, don't allow them to go against the current. I think Mao himself was the biggest example of bourgeois rights—anyone who opposed him was knocked down!" Informant no. 15. "Bourgeois rights are formed by the habit of power [xiguan quanli ]. The structure of society produces man's need for power, wealth and status, extending even to the realm of abstract thinking and concepts." Male informant, born 1956 in Guangdong, free professional family background, student individual class status, sent down to a production and construction military camp (shengchan jianshe bingtuan ) in the Changjiang countryside. Migrated illegally to Hong Kong in November 1976 to get out of the countryside. Interviewed May 6, 1977. (Hereinafter informant no. 16.)

As far as the critique of selfishness underpinning the bourgeois rights campaign is concerned, considerable skepticism or even recalcitrance was evident. Several opined that this vice was "intrinsic" (benxing ): "Even small children understand how to eat well, dress well." Informant no. 37. "Only lazy people want equality," said a former Red Guard and sent-down youth. Informant no. 8. Although some warned against stratification, most were keenly interested in higher living standards. One interviewee manifested the contradictions with considerable sensitivity: "Although the Communist Party demands equality among the people, bourgeois rights are a product of objective reality. On the one hand, they are residues left over from before the Liberation. On the other hand, they are also needed by society nowadays. The objective reality of today's social organization is that, between the leaders and the led, there are differences in wages, differences in cultural levels, and a rather weak material foundation. . . . This, caused by objective reality and history, cannot be eliminated at the present stage. This is the fairness of unfairness because both society and masses need leaders." Informant no. 17.

[35] "All along I had thought Song Jiang was a righteous person, a heroic figure. I was confused when Song Jiang was criticized. I do not know whom Song Jiang was supposed to represent. I think he symbolized some kind of thought [mou yi zhong sixiang ]. . . . People were indifferent to it." Informant no. 38.

already alluded to earlier) were its glorification of manual labor as a transformative experience, and its idealization of closer relations between elites and masses. Change was achieved with respect to each of these aspects, but the degree and direction of change depended on the experience of participants, the most decisive criterion being whether the participant conceived himself/herself to have been a victim or beneficiary of the change at issue.

In terms of traditional Chinese conceptions of vertical mobility, manual labor represented an absence (or loss) of status, but from the Maoist (indeed, from the Marxist) perspective labor is the source of human value. Thus if elites (or their children) who had risen "above" manual labor were obliged once again to perform it, their haughty attitudes toward the working classes would be transformed. Although manual labor on a rather substantial part-time basis was introduced in all educational and administrative institutions, two categories of citizens were subjected to a more concentrated regimen: déclassé officials and radical youth.

The former were installed in "May 7 cadre schools," originally intended to facilitate greater contact with the working classes as well as to acquaint cadres with the concrete problems of production; however, cadres were soon insulated from the indigenous population, due to friction between cadres and peasants. Although "some cadres were very frightened," according to a former cadre, "afraid of hard work on the one hand and of the masses on the other," the situation was alleviated through subvention to such an extent that such schools were usually not economically self-sufficient. Recollections were not particularly bitter, sometimes even wistful:

I stayed in a May 7 cadre school for half a year, planting fruit trees and growing vegetables. The work there was easy and the living conditions were good. All the people there had made mistakes and they therefore tended to look down on one another. With good appetites, ample sleep, and fresh air, a lot of people gained weight after they came to the cadre school. Living happily together, many did not even want to return to their own work units.^[36]

One former inmate, who at times evokes Solzhenitsyn's Denisovich in her tributes to the solidarity induced by shared suffering, emerged with a new attitude toward manual labor that would have gratified Mao Zedong (cf. chapter 2):

The distaste one has for mud—with its usual mixture of phlegm, mucus, urine and faeces—vanished once we had taken off our shoes and socks and started walking around in the warm and yielding ooze. It was slippery and wet, but it

[36] Ibid.

did not seem at all "dirty." . . . The thought suddenly struck me: Is this what they mean about "changing your attitude" toward physical labor?^[37]

Whereas redemption through labor was quietly deemphasized in cadre rehabilitation after the fall of Lin Biao, it remained an important "career option" for China's urban youth throughout the Cultural Revolution decade; the most authoritative estimate places the number of participants in the "up to the mountains and down to the countryside" (shangshan xiaxiang ) campaign at 12 million, or about 10 percent of China's urban population.^[38] The transition was far more drastic for urban youth than for cadres, both because of the more sheltered previous experience of these youth and because of the harsher quality of the objective experience. Although production brigades received a certain subsidy to defray absorption costs, these youth were expected to become self-supporting settlers in this new subculture for the rest of their lives—this was to be no mere rite of passage in an urban career plan. A few no doubt succeeded in renouncing old aspirations and adapting to this new life style (unfortunately thereby eliminating themselves from this sample)—their success evoked an ambivalent combination of admiration and contempt from their confreres.^[39] But others found a way, albeit with some cognitive strain, to adapt recidivistic ambitions to their new environment. Two representative tales, the first a "success," the second a failure, may be recounted by way of illustration:

The daughter of a well-to-do Beijing Party cadre and enterprise director (changzhang ), having been active in the China Youth League (CYL), joined the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution and volunteered to go down to the countryside upon their demobilization in response to Mao's call for educated youth to do so. Although her father attempted to dissuade her, she opted for a remote and austere rural commune in Heilongjiang. After her second year there, she decided however it was "just too tough" for her, so she returned home, crying to her mother that she could endure no more. Her mother urged her to remain in Beijing illegally and they would support her, but her father felt that as a cadre this would place him in an awkward position. After a year's medical leave, she returned to her commune, but her objectives had changed. She strove to

[37] Yang Jiang, A Cadre School Life: Six Chapters , trans. Geremie Barme (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co., 1982), p. 33; also see p.36.

[38] Thomas P. Bernstein, Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages: The Transfer of Youth from Urban to Rural China (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 2.

[39] "We all admired her on the one hand, but privately said she was foolish on the other." Informant no. 15. On this general question, see Thomas P. Bernstein, "Communication and Value Change in the Chinese Program of Sending Urban Youths to the Countryside," in Godwin Chu and Francis L. K. Hsu, eds., Moving a Mountain: Cultural Change in China (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1979), pp. 341–63.

join the Party, which was easy because of her background, and the second time members of the production team were chosen to be sent to the university she was selected: she was intelligent, exhibited a good attitude (biaoxian ), and had good cadre relations. She chose to study foreign languages, in order to minimize the chances of being sent back to the countryside, choosing Swedish because it was more distinctive (short supply, high demand) than English. She now cut herself off from political activities and did nothing but study. But when the first students were selected for a cultural exchange with Sweden, she was passed over because of her deficient political performance. So during her final two years in college, she became politically activist: she lived on campus, helped other students wash their clothes and clean the rooms in the morning (to develop better mass relations), and cultivated relations with the workers' propaganda team (which had responsibility for gongzuo fenpei —allocation of work assignments) by procuring expensive cigarettes for them through the "back door" and inviting them to her home to celebrate Spring Festival (Chinese New Year). When mass movements arose, she kept three objectives in view: (1) demonstrate activism, (2) avoid insulting cadres, and (3) avoid becoming a target. To realize these objectives, she kept her mouth shut during the opening stages of the campaign, expressing herself only when it became clear which direction the movement was taking and then writing a poster that merely synthesized officially acceptable views. She wrote well, and her posters were always lauded, though closer scrutiny would reveal that they contained nothing original. If the movement "became bad" (like the May 16th clique), she would quickly publish a self-criticism before others had begun to criticize her. As a result of her efforts, upon graduation she was assigned to work for the New China News Agency (NCNA), universally regarded by her peers as an excellent placement.^[40]

Comrade Xie (pseudonym) was the only son in a family of free professionals, and his parents had implanted in him a desire for an intellectual career. He did well in both studies and in student activities in high school and nourished a hope to be admitted to Qinghua University upon graduation. He had just received notification of his acceptance into the CYL, a significant breakthrough, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. During the Red Guard movement he faced a dilemma when both parents came under attack for revisionist tendencies. He resolved it by "drawing a clear line of demarcation" and inviting Red Guards to come to his house and rebel against his mother. Throughout the movement he endeavored,

[40] Female informant, born 1956 in Hangzhou, of landlord family background, student class status, graduated high school before the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Left Beijing legally (overseas Chinese family connections) in February 1976 (hereinafter informant no. 3).

in this compensatory manner, to be very "red," becoming a member of the radical Red Flag faction in Guangzhou. When his faction was suppressed at the end of 1968 and he was sent to the countryside, he was greatly dismayed and nonplussed. But he soon discovered opportunities to realize his old ambitions even within this austere new environment. He worked hard, cultivated cadre relations, becoming the production team's Mao Zedong's Thought adviser, rising to chief brigade adviser (zong fudaoyuan ). He also worked very hard, wearing only a pair of shorts so as to become brown in the sun (symbolizing) his transformation). He was thus one of the few sent-down youth to receive large quantities of money and food at the end of the year when profits were distributed. By way of cultivating mass relations he lived in a peasant household and developed good relations with the entire family, learning to speak fluent Hakka and sparking a romance with the family's eldest daughter. (At the same time, however, he maintained correspondence with his original intended, who had been sent down to a camp on Hainan Island.) These efforts finally bore fruit in 1973, when the Party branch selected him to go to college. But his plans were dashed by "one careless mistake":

I wrote to my girl friend on Hainan Island that I would be going to college. I also revealed in my letter that my hard work in the past five years and everything concerning my transformation was only for the purpose of getting out of the village to go to college. I don't know how but the peasant's daughter got the letter and read it before it was mailed. . . . She said that I had cheated her and was a rascal [liumang ]. I tried to get the letter back; the most damaging things I wrote in the letter had to do with my pretense at thought reform—all the love-talk was of minor importance. But . . . I was unable to get back my letter. What was more frightening, they took the letter to the Party branch! That was the end, everything about me was finished! Five years of hard work had all been wasted!

After vainly attempting to coordinate a joint escape with his girl friend on Hainan Island, Xie struck out on his own for Hong Kong. "I began as a true revolutionary but ended up as a phony," he concluded sardonically. "Such was the transformation of my thought."^[41]

These experiences, representative of any number that might be cited, illustrate the tenacity of individualistic ambition and seriously discredit any claim to the transformative potency of manual labor. Perhaps one reason for its inefficacy was the available counterexample of those who were still able to move upward by adapting to the changing skill market, making fools of those who had humbled themselves through labor. Appa-

[41] Male informant, free professional family background, student class status, migrated to Hong Kong illegally in August 1974. Born 1948 in Guangdong, refused to reveal more. Interviewed July 13, 1977 (hereinafter informant no. 7).

rently "ambitionists" who specialized in the manipulation of symbols were able to go far, as indicated by such popular sayings as "Liars can move up in the world" (shuo jiahua de ren neng shangqu ), and "Those who sing a high-pitched melody can climb" (diaozi gao de ren neng shangqu ).^[42] These hapless youth remained resentfully aware that radical elites who verbally endorsed the value of manual labor were able to avoid it. Aside from that, manual labor was in fact very "tough" (ku ), boring, perhaps inherently difficult to love.^[43] For whatever reasons, none of these youthful informants transformed their dread of physical labor by participating in it, and most came to abhor it all the more, though some gleaned sympathy for the peasants trapped in such fates.^[44] The contrast with the milder reaction of sent-down cadres deserves further consideration—perhaps their more thorough indoctrination inured them to hardship—perhaps also, their limited sojourn, and subsidized living standard, was less traumatizing.

With regard to relations between masses and elites, the mobilizational experience of the Cultural Revolution brought into view an ideal with which the masses had perhaps had little empirical experience but yearned for, nonetheless: "The purpose of the Cultural Revolution was to introduce democracy."^[45] This did not necessarily conjure up images of an electoral apparatus, multiparty legislature, or civil rights, but participants did hope for greater political equality between elites and masses and more freedom of expression.^[46] The early Cultural Revolution, as an explosive breakthrough from a high degree of constraint to unaccustomed freedom, seemed suddenly to actualize these repressed desires. "It was almost as if a frog jumped out of a well and saw the ocean—it almost drowned!"^[47] The big-character poster provided the means to penetrate and expose previously unapproachable elites under cover of anonymity; for many, the appearance of the first poster in their unit remained a memorable occasion.^[48] After the Red Guards had shown the way, "the masses were not as afraid of the leaders as they had been before,"^[49] and in fact "the leaders became afraid of the masses."^[50] Previously the attitude of the masses toward cadres (particularly Party cadres) had been "respect and avoidance" (jing er yuan zhi ), "daring to get angry, not daring to voice it" (gan nu bu gan yan ), fearing cadre retaliation. Though retaliation admittedly remained a risk, "masses became more daring in expressing

[42] Informant no. 7. Also male informant, born 1947 in Guangdong, of free professional family background, student individual class status, sent down to state farm during the Cultural Revolution after graduation from high school. Emigrated illegally in July 1974 to Hong Kong. Interviewed April 26, 1977 (hereinafter informant no. 22).

[43] Informant no. 3.

[44] Informant no. 25.

[45] Informant no. 36.

[46] Informants no. 9, 38.

[47] Informant no. 15.

[48] Informant no. 8.

[49] Informant no. 37.

[50] Ibid.

their opinions to the cadres,"^[51] and "Because of the Cultural Revolution, many leaders dared not retaliate against the masses."^[52] Cadres in fact often became quite ingratiating. In the words of a former medical technician in Zhengzhou:

Before the Cultural Revolution I didn't know who was the unit [Party] Secretary, didn't know who were the cadres. They didn't talk to us, didn't know our names, lived in separate residences [gao gan lou , or high cadre apartments]. . . . After the Cultural Revolution, they moved and lived in the same apartment building with us. They were closer to the masses. Their children played with ours, they walked around in the yard, talked with us, and if we had some problem, we could talk with them. They didn't necessarily solve your problems, but you could talk with them.^[53]

Activists, too, who had previously functioned as clandestine informants, felt vulnerable in this role after the critique of Liu Shaoqi's work teams (and especially of his wife's "Taoyuan Experience" during the "Four Cleans"), and became "more concerned with mass relations because they were afraid they might get struggled."^[54]

Despite a consensus among these informants that mass mobilization had resulted in greater political equality and more reciprocal elite-mass communication, this outcome was not deemed an unmixed blessing. Three complaints appeared most frequently: first, this was democracy without law, and the work norms and regulations that had previously obtained fell into desuetude.^[55] In this connection, cadre corruption, meaning specifically the informal allocation of favors (e.g., housing), became rife.^[56] Second, cadres often tended to backslide into old patterns of arrogance and authoritarianism. "Many cadres really changed. But many changed back. . . . It was a question of time."^[57] Third, democracy did not necessarily result in the elevation of merit. The new leaders might be more accessible but they were incompetent "good old boys" (lao hao ren ), whose concern for mass feedback impaired their leadership.^[58]

The tragic paradox was that greater political equality, in the context of an overwhelming emphasis on ideological conformity (yiyuanhua ), ultimately resulted not in expanded freedom of expression but in its sharp

[51] Ibid.

[52] Informants no. 23, 36.

[53] Informant no. 37.

[54] Informant no. 31. Also: "During meetings, they expressed their opinions [fayan ] more, wrote more big-character posters; during mass criticism, they made more criticisms. . . . Before, they were appointed by the leadership. Afterward, they were elected by the masses, had to receive a simple majority." Informant no. 37.

[55] After being rehabilitated, "veteran cadres tended not to make decisions with the speed and assurance they had in the past, because they were afraid and tried to protect themselves from criticism." Informant no. 35.

[56] Informant no. 22.

[57] Informants no. 22, 31, 36.

[58] Informant no. 35.

curtailment: "The Cultural Revolution had been expected to bring greater freedom but its actual consequences were just the contrary."^[59] Politics was "in command," but people tried to avoid discussing politics unless they were with close friends, relatives, or members of the same faction. The reason was that what could be said publicly was so limited that one might only repeat the same clichés. When informants were asked to reconcile reports of constrictive conformity with other reports (often from the same informant) of improved elite-mass contact and greater responsiveness to grievances, it was explained that the masses in effect practiced ideological self-censorship before voicing their suggestions to cadres.^[60]

After the Cultural Revolution, I obviously talked about politics more than before. I talked with all kinds of different peole. I talked in different political terms to people with different political viewpoints. I would not discuss my true feelings. What I talked about was all lies.^[61]

The rhetorical emphasis on rebellion and struggle in the context of pervasive ideological conformity led to some ironic consequences, such as "Holding high the red flag to oppose the red flag," or "The fleeing thief shouting 'Catch the thief!'" In fact very few of these informants thought that "going against the current" was praiseworthy, and even they knew it was not prudent. There was no legal distinction between "against the current" (fan chaoliu ) and "counterrevolutionary" (fandong ), some pointed out.^[62] None of the official models of such behavior were held in much esteem (particularly not Zhang Tiesheng). More valid exemplars were sometimes cited, such as Li Yizhe in Guangzhou or Li Chunsheng in Beijing, who were generally viewed as valiant but quixotic figures.^[63]

Behavioral Change

The attempt to transform everyday practice to conform to ideological precept had its most telling impact on routine meeting behavior and on workaday participation in the economy. In both realms, the impact was to promote more exacting conformity to prescribed routines, combined with progressive detachment of affect and covert resort to evasive maneuvers.

Chinese peasants have long complained that whereas the Nationalists imposed too many taxes (shui ), the Communists held too many meetings (hui ), but during the Cultural Revolution decade meetings were convened with redoubled intensity. "Study" (xuexi ) meetings were held

[59] Informants no. 21, 37.

[60] Informants no. 16, 31.

[61] Informant no. 22.

[62] Informants no. 16, 32, 34.

[63] Informants no. 4, 22.

twice as frequently as before, usually meeting at least two afternoons a week. Previously the texts studied were more intellectually challenging, at least for cadres and intellectuals, consisting for example of studies of the history of the Soviet Communist Party or Marxist political economy, but now they usually consisted of selections from Mao's Selected Works or the latest editorials from the "two papers and one journal" (liang bao yi kan —People's Daily , Red Flag , Liberation Army Daily ). After 1971, they consisted of more central documents (zhongyang wenjian ). Sometimes the reports were of great interest, such as the report following the first Sino-Soviet border clash, or Lin Biao's unsuccessful escape attempt, but usually the texts failed to hold the interest of the participants, who did not bother to hide their indifference (particularly if they were of good class background).

During the meeting, a lot of people would do other things—write letters, read novels, knit, chat—sometimes the talking was so loud you couldn't hear the report, and the leader would say, "Don't talk so loud!" People would fall asleep, and he would say, "Wake up, you!" Some people didn't even attend. Sometimes they took roll to control for this, but that was only temporarily effective.^[64]

During a movement, the normal meeting schedule was greatly intensified (jinzhang ). For the Criticism of Deng Xiaoping in 1976, workers in a technical agricultural machinery plant on Hainan met seven nights a week, in meetings lasting until 11 P.M.^[65] During the campaign to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius, political study was held six days a week, with all of Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday devoted to study. Thus workers lost their weekends, while management sacrificed half the work week to political activities. A new campaign would be signaled by the release of a packet of central documents and by publication of an editorial in the "two papers and one journal"; the provincial Party committees would then issue provincial documents to be dispatched to every locality, triggering a proliferation of local documents. Then rectification would commence. Big-character posters would appear—spontaneously during the early Cultural Revolution, usually composed by a writing committee (in careful adherence to central documents and editorials) thereafter. A campaign had its own dynamic, and the early phase was most dangerous, particularly for participants with bad class backgrounds or "historical problems," because of the need to identify criticism targets. If a self-

[64] Informant no. 37. See also Claudie Broyelle et al., China: A Second Look , trans. Sarah Matthews (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1980), p. 111, which is an account based on several years' residence in China during the Cultural Revolution decade.

[65] The intensity of the meeting schedule varied somewhat depending on the enthusiasm of the local cadres in charge, so the Hainan plant's schedule may have been exceptional.

criticism was submitted at this stage of the movement it stood less chance of being accepted than if submitted at the end. The terminal stages of a movement were marked by an emphasis on "unity," which might "put a mask on things for awhile."^[66]

Generally speaking, the campaigns of the Cultural Revolution decade fostered acute critical sensitivity to the failings of cadres and intellectuals and enhanced the power of the workers. Management was in effect deprived of the use of mobilization as a negative sanction as well as of any control over positive sanctions (due to the wage freeze and the "iron rice bowl"). The result was a precipitous decline in the morale of both management and labor and a corresponding increase in strikes (bagong ), slowdowns (daigong ), absenteeism (kuanggong ), and general "softness, laziness, disunity" (ruan , lan , san ).^[67] The most disruptive of these forms of labor indiscipline was the strike—which was also most severely sanctioned, hence least frequently encountered. Strikes did, however, affect industrial production in the second quarters of 1974, 1975, and 1976, creating particularly damaging bottlenecks in the transportation and heavy industrial sectors.

Perhaps most notorious was the series of strikes that hit the central industrial city of Hangzhou, beginning in 1972 and reaching a violent climax in late 1974 and 1975, when factional conflict resulted in fatalities, industry ground to a halt, and there were serious shortages. Official postmortems explain the Hangzhou strikes in terms of a conspiracy theory, assigning blame to one Weng Senhe, vice-chairman of the Zhejiang Trade Union Federation, former Revolutionary Rebel (also however sometimes described as a "plump, gray-haired cadre"), and radical "agent" for Wang Hongwen.^[68] But available eyewitness testimony suggests a rather different interpretation. If some of the strike leaders were former rebels, it should not be forgotten that there were "loyalist" as well as "radical" rebel factions; it seems unlikely that any "radical" rebels could have survived the military purges of the early 1970s with their leadership positions intact. The initiators of the strike were workers whose worldview may have more closely approximated that of Deng Xiaoping than that of the Gang of Four—they wanted bonuses and higher wages, which were taboo from the Maoist perspective.

The 1974 incident began in the spring, when workers at the Hangzhou Automobile Electric Machine Plant (HAEMP) requested resumption of the payment of "subsidiary wages" (fuzhu gongzi —equivalent to a bonus). But the factory Party committee rejected the request, even when it received the support of the municipal industrial bureau. When workers

[66] Informant no. 34.

[67] Squires collection.

[68] Ming Bao , January 3, 1977, p. 1; Hong Kong Standard , April 12, 1977, p. 16; etc.

at the Hangzhou Silk Factory (HSF) and the Hangzhou Construction Materials Factory (HCMF) heard of the HAEMP request they made similar demands, as did workers in the city and provincial coal mines. At this point one Zhu Wufu, one of the local faction leaders during the Cultural Revolution and now a member of the HCMF's Revolutionary Committee (RC), became engaged on behalf of the petitioning workers, and also recruited other members of his network. The strike began in the HCMF and spread to the HAEMP and the HSF and beyond, until at least half the city's industries had shut down. After Liu Di, minister of light industry, failed to resolve the dispute, Wang Hongwen himself came to Hangzhou. Contrary to what one might have expected had Wang conspired to foment the strike, Wang adopted a very hard line, putting strikers in jail.^[69] The workers split between those who supported the strike and those who opposed it, reflecting Cultural Revolution cleavages, and Wang's "simple and ruthless methods" only polarized the situation and caused the strike to spread further, and include some nonindustrial production, administrative, and educational units.

As a result of Wang's failure, Deng Xiaoping was sent to resolve the problem. He took a more moderate stance toward worker wage demands—no doubt partly because he could sincerely sympathize with them:

Once Deng Xiaoping arrived in Hangzhou, he stationed the PLA in the factories to protect the buildings and machines. He also assigned soldiers to take over the work posts directly, relying on the minority of the workers who had not joined the strikes to learn the techniques for running the machines and continue production. Deng Xiaoping also read some of Zhou Enlai's directives to the effect that the central government would investigate and discuss the workers' practical demands, and those with real difficulties would be resolved as soon as possible. He also pointed out that wage problems were the same all over the country and that it was impossible to solve the wage problems of Hangzhou's workers first—the whole country's wage problems had to be resolved, but they had to be resolved step by step.^[70]

Deng's more tolerant attitude toward practical demands allowed him to adopt a discriminating and pragmatic negotiating posture beyond the range of the radical Wang. In accord with the principle "leniency to those who are honest, harsh treatment to those who refuse" (tanbai congkuan , kangju congyan ), he succeeded in luring most of the workers back to work while subjecting the "ringleaders" (such as Zhu) to labor reform.^[71]

[69] Informant came to Hong Kong from Hangzhou in August 1976, and declined to divulge much information about himself, though he insisted he was actively involved as a member of the Hangzhou work force. Interviewed May 24, 1977 (hereinafter informant no. 40).

[70] Ibid.

[71] Ibid.

Far more common than strikes were various forms of slowdown (toulan ), which impaired production without anyone's publicly taking responsibility for doing so. "There have been continual slowdown strikes since 1968," reported a former member of a local RC Standing Committee.^[72] Just how much organization was behind such movements is problematic, because it remained invisible. Least organized was tuigong (absenteeism)—people would stay home because they were dissatisfied with their pay, or bored, or because they saw other people doing so (and getting away with it). Somewhat more openly organized was the daigong (slowdown), which consisted of stopping production in a plant while allowing workers to work on their private projects, drink tea, or sleep.^[73]

The slowdown or strike was sometimes related to factionalism, insofar as if one faction was in power the other would refuse to work.^[74] But factionalism if anything was even more pervasive than labor indiscipline, ranking among the most significant stigmata of the Cultural Revolution era on everyday life. In 1966–68 factionalism took the form of openly constituted fighting bands (zhandui ), into which much of society was mobilized into active or passive support. In 1969–71, punishment was meted out to identifiable zhandui , and in the 1971–76 period factions usually operated more clandestinely. Their core membership nevertheless harkened to the cleavages formed during the period of spontaneous mobilization, and members retained their ideological identity during subsequent movements. Estimates of the rate of factional participation varied considerably, but the consensus seems to be that there was a gradual decline and only a minority remained actively engaged. Each faction was likely to have representation on the unit RC, later perhaps even on the Party committee, and the unit activists (jiji fenzi ) were also likely to be split into factions; therefore, "to really be a good person was impossible."^[75] In some units conservatives held a majority, in others radicals; conservatives had the upper hand in most units following reconstruction of the Party, but particularly in those units in which intellectuals were strongly represented (schools—even PLA schools—hospitals, some government organs, many Beijing and Shanghai factories), radicals retained a preponderant influence.

The strongest motive for individual factional involvement seems to have been to acquire "greater power within the unit."^[76] If a person was "not too good" factionally speaking, others would not work for him. One could talk heart-to-heart only with other faction members. In some villages factional cleavages coincided with traditional rivalries between

[72] Informant no. 13.

[73] Informant no. 37.

[74] Informant no. 13.

[75] Informant no. 35.

[76] Informant no. 38.

family-name lineages, reviving clan feuds.^[77] Middle-aged workers and cadres—those with vested interests in the status quo—tended to join conservative factions, whereas younger workers, young intellectuals, "black elements," and ambitious cadres inclined to join radical factions. The faction leadership would attempt to recruit members from the political majority to decide issues of interest to them, and this middle majority was more ideologically flexible than the factional core (e.g., "I joined whichever faction had the largest organization").^[78]

The chief disadvantage of factionalism was of course that it tended to exacerbate intramural conflict. Factions might fight about anything—in one case there was even conflict in the formation of a factory soccer team, the best player in the plant having been excluded because he belonged to a weaker faction.^[79] Any policy the center failed to define precisely or left to subordinate organs to determine locally became an arena of factional conflict: the distribution of housing could occasion factional conflict, for example, or the recruitment of youth to be sent down to the countryside. If there were conflicting signals from the center indicating elite controversy, as in the spring of 1975 over wage policy, there was factional conflict anticipating and lobbying for desirable changes. By the same token, "what decided victory or defeat in factional struggles was central policy."^[80] Once central policy was set, the majority quickly fell into line, with the membership of the losing faction lapsing into temporary passivity.

Another informal escape mechanism used to cope with the everyday difficulties posed by permanent mobilization was "taking the back door" (zou houmen ). People took the back door because the demand for certain goods and services exceeded the supply, which might be artificially restricted, or rationed. Under these circumstances, those "gatekeepers" who controlled the supply of specific goods or services (e.g., truck drivers, doctors, carpenters, blacksmiths, salespersons, and most importantly

[77] Male informant, born 1940 in Guangdong of lower-middle peasant family background, lower-middle peasant class status. Had been a member of the CYL, received education up to grade four in primary school before becoming a peasant, also a class leader (banzhang ) in the militia. Illegally emigrated to Hong Kong in April 1977. Interviewed August 1–2, 1977 (hereinafter informant no. 10).

[78] 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).

[79] Informant no. 37.

[80] A legal émigré from Guangdong (Xinhui), male, born 1948 of worker family background. Had been a CYL member, a Red Guard, and a junior high school graduate, before becoming a second grade worker in a small automobile repair and assembly factory in Guangzhou. Interviewed July 3, 1977 (hereinafter informant no. 24).

cadres—particularly personnel cadres) could use their discretionary power to allocate gifts and curry favor. All informants without exception had used the back door, and most considered it legitimate or at least necessary under the circumstances, though most tacitly agreed with the Gang of Four in deeming cadre privilege unjustified in view of the structural advantages of high position.^[81] Though back door transactions were certainly not unheard of before 1966, the Cultural Revolution had caused them to proliferate far beyond the original elite network, informants agreed, due primarily to the disintegration of formal institutions.^[82]

In sum, the late Cultural Revolution seemed to reveal the shadow side of the explosive emancipation its advocates glimpsed during the initial period. The cathartic breakthrough did not usher in the utopia but at best brought a fleeting sense of euphoria that soon gave way to an incessant, compulsive pounding, as campaign followed campaign in accelerating tempo. The cognitive insight into the necessary priority of the public interest was not denied, but merely gave way to boredom in the absence of available alternatives; later attempts to specify and elaborate this insight into a comprehensive philosophy eluded most of its audience. Behaviorally, participants conformed by exhibiting the types of action prescribed in the appropriate contexts, albeit with progressive detachment of affect and a rising coincidence of deviant extracurricular behavior. In their attitudes, participants often expressed vehement antipathy to values and norms they numbly affirmed at a cognitive level. The constant undulations of the polemical dialectic entailed that only those "targets" survived who were capable of utterly flexible opportunism. By the end of ten years of cultural transformation, the utopian vision revealed in the initial breakthrough had been almost completely obscured by tactical considerations.

Conclusion

The attempt to link mass mobilization to economic growth on the one hand and to thought reform on the other failed, seriously crippling efforts to continue the revolution. In our analysis of this failure, we have focused

[81] Male informant, born 1941 in Guangdong of bourgeois family background, student class status (university graduate). He was a sixth grade technician (and thus a state cadre) in a farm machine factory. Interviewed July 5, 1977 (hereinafter informant no. 1). Also male informant, born 1945 in Guangxi of capitalist family background, nevertheless became CYL member, later a primary school teacher (and hence a state cadre). Legally emigrated to Hong Kong in 1975. Interviewed July 10–11, 1975 (hereinafter informant no. 26). See also B. Michael Frolic, Mao's China: Sixteen Portraits of Life in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 130.

[82] Informants no. 15, 35, 37.

first on economic factors, then on psycho-cultural transformation. The same sequence will be followed in these concluding remarks.

Why did mobilization fail to stimulate economic production? First of all, the conceptualization of mobilization as a dependent variable ("effect") of economic factors was forsworn in principle, under the pretense that the masses would be motivated purely by altruistic ideals. This approach was a hallmark of all radicals during the Cultural Revolution, with the distinction that Lin Biao placed somewhat more compensatory emphasis on coercion, the cultural radicals on ideological saturation. This has not always been the case. As we noted in chapter 2, material incentives were once effectively used (in conjunction with normative appeals) to mobilize the masses. But the redistribution of the means of production had exhausted the main source of relatively inexpensive material incentives. The use of normative incentives as a form of credit for deferred material satisfaction suffered a credibility gap after the Great Leap Forward, in the course of which Mao discovered that material incentives pandered to base and selfish motives anyhow. Henceforth, though certain implicit benefits (e.g., designation as "activist," Party membership) remained available, mobilization increasingly detached itself from explicit material incentives. Mobilization became economically autonomous, a politics of gratuitous self-dramatization.

Second, neither did a clear understanding of the role of mobilization as an independent variable ("cause") emerge, though the interdependence of production and revolution was affirmed in the abstract. There was no correlation whatever between mobilization and material benefits, as wage levels remained frozen notwithstanding all mobilizational vicissitudes. With the exception of small-scale rural industry, which continued to grow rapidly through the 1970s under radical ideological sanction but isolated from urban movements, mobilization and production proved to be inversely correlated. The model heroes (e.g., Zhang Tiesheng) and model units (e.g., Xiaojinzhuang) of the 1970s did not even advertise any correlation between mobilization and productivity, but the value of mobilization for its own sake. The reason for the decoupling of mobilization and production has partly to do with the factional split, of course, but underlying it was an old, unresolved contradiction between two different approaches to continuing revolution: the economy had fallen sway to the "engineers," who ran it as a Stalinist "revolution from above," with five-year plans, a centralized ministerial bureaucracy, and rigid adherence to authoritarian discipline; the apparatus of propaganda and culture had so completely assimilated the values of "storming," on the other hand, that mobilization spontaneously assumed an antibureaucratic, anarchic orientation.

The reasons for the failure of mobilization to induce lasting and wholehearted psycho-cultural transformation are somewhat more com-

plex. Two explanations may be discounted or at least qualified at the outset. It is true, as noted above, that mobilization became detached from material incentives, that its "lessons" hence received no systematic "positive reinforcement." Yet this lack does not imply that nothing was learned. Skinner to the contrary notwithstanding, human learning can occur in the absence of "conditioning"; it is for example noteworthy how many informants drew morals from the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, although these contradicted previous experience and were also disconfirmed by subsequent developments. On the other hand, if participants received systematic negative reinforcement from the mobilizational experience, as did its victims, it is not difficult to predict an adverse reaction. Few former victims, according to our interviews, really "repented". And those who deemed themselves "victims" were vast in number and sometimes exalted in status, forming a self-conscious political group of considerable solidarity and sense of mission. "I do not believe that there was any truly reformed person," opined one former target. "There is no need to give examples; they are everywhere, from Deng Xiaoping at the top to the masses at the bottom."^[83]

It is also true that the campaigns of the Cultural Revolution were highly politicized, and the focus on polemical targets may have detracted from their pedagogical function. Yet politicization is quite typical of Chinese mass criticism campaigns. Actually, a case can be made that the campaigns of the late Cultural Revolution period were insufficiently politicized. In a successful mass criticism movement, the polemical and pedagogic functions are integrated: the teaching of the ideological "lesson" coincides with the unmasking of the ulterior target, resulting in a cathartic externalization of guilt and an enhanced resolve to adhere to the norms. But in the late Cultural Revolution period the delicate balance of power at the top that Mao preferred to any designated succession arrangement frustrated efforts to choreograph a criticism movement that would allow the villain to be climactically unveiled. The campaigns usually remained on an Aesopian level throughout, arousing a sense of peeved bafflement. Lacking an official revelation of the "real" meaning of a campaign, participants often reductionistically dismissed the whole ideological overlay: "I don't think Mao wanted to change thoughts at all—he just wanted power," inferred one former radical.^[84]

[83] Second interview, informant no. 29.

[84] 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 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 having committed manslaughter in the course of the Cultural Revolution. Interviewed May 30, 1977 (hereinafter informant no. 19).

There are three reasons why the later campaigns drew invidious comparisons with the initial outburst, however mixed the reaction to the latter. First, the "revolutionary breakthrough" model that made its debut in the spring and summer of 1966 had already exhausted its utility as far as the leadership was concerned by the summer of the following year. Though it exerted immense psychological appeal, it was intolerably destructive, and tended to escalate popular expectations well beyond realistic prospect of fulfillment. To the question, What next?, it provided little information, leaving matters to drift back to the status quo ante . The notion that "smashing frames" could suddenly solve problems that had eluded more patient and considered efforts gradually lost credibility. Thus this highly effective mobilizational device fell into disuse and even tacit disrepute.

Second, ten years of intensive and virtually incessant mobilization is after all longer than two years, and the constant repetition of clichés eventually led to surfeit. As one informant put it: "After hearing 'Grasp class struggle' too many times, we became desensitized [mamuhua ]. It could not arouse our interest at all. To grasp class struggle had some deterrent effect, but it could only suppress the eruption of struggles without eliminating the source of troubles."^[85]

Finally, the kaleidoscopically shifting ideological focus of the campaigns gave rise to great confusion. The masses were presented with a parade of campaigns, each raising different (and often mutually incompatible) critical themes, one following another, usually without clear resolution, in increasingly rapid succession. In brief review: the first wave of late Cultural Revolution campaigns (1968–70) was radically egalitarian and militaristic, fostering literal conformity with Mao's Thought. The second (late 1970–72) criticized Chen Boda and Lin Biao, attempting to repudiate "ultra-leftist" policies and promote a moderate policy line. The Criticism of Lin Biao and Confucius campaign (1973–74) essentially opposed Zhou Enlai and the moderate course he symbolized. The year 1975 began with a moderate initiative, was followed almost immediately by a radical attack upon it, followed in turn by a conservative mobilization of cadre support in the Dazhai Conference, then by another radical campaign in defense of the "new-born things" of the Cultural Revolution. And so it went. "Before the Cutltural Revolution, I would believe that Mao could reform people's thinking," confessed one informant. "After the Cultural Revolution, I did not know what kind of thinking Mao wanted to reform."^[86] A medical doctor who had not been criticized expressed sympathy for those who had: "It is very difficult to say whether the thinking of those who were criticized and struggled [against] would be

[85] Informant no. 24.

[86] Informant no. 31.

reformed. If it was me, my thinking would change back and forth many times. I was afraid, therefore I would change."^[87]

Mass mobilization, which had in the past been effectively employed by a unified elite for clearly stipulated objectives, proved to be a wasting asset in the hands of a divided elite committed at best to revolution for its own sake (and at worst to factional maneuvers). Mobilizational resources had been exhausted, and it proved impossible to reach consensus on a new target against which the masses could be usefully unleashed.

[87] Informant no. 35.