Situational Groups and Rehabilitation

The purge pattern indicates that the conflicting groups during the CR do not fit neatly into any of the conflict groups suggested in the standard literature. They were too complex to be explained as "tendency groups," those people with a similar ideological pro-

[6] S. N. Eisenstadt and L. Roniger, Patrons, Clients, and Friends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

pensity that leads them to take similar positions on various specific issues.^[7] Nor can they be called "opinion groups," which are issue-specific, because the elite conflicts were too intense, severe, and well structured. Although the conflicts involved institutional cleavages among the party, the government, and the military, the formal authority of Mao, which all institutions accepted, and the diffused power bases of the various conflict groups limited the applicability of "institutional groups" on which the theory of bureaucratic politics has developed. Many informal groups based on personal ties were active in the CR, but it is difficult to ascertain to what extent they became political groups actually affecting the outcome of the conflicts. It is a "faction" concept that has been most widely used in analyzing the dynamics of the CR. By definition, a faction is very limited in size and capability, and, therefore, factional politics result in "immobilism."^[8] The idea of a micro-group such as a faction is of limited use because the CR conflicts involved almost all Chinese, including both the masses and the political elite. The CR conflicts, moreover, caused many ideological and policy disputes, which frequently ended in real changes in these areas—a situation that runs counter to the meaning of a faction.

Because of the large number of political groups that emerged during the chaotic process of the elite conflicts and mass mobilization, the numerous issues over which they clashed, and the constantly forming and changing coalitions, it is extremely difficult to identify convincingly the factors that led to the CR. Instead, looking at how conflicts were structured in terms of the various groups that came into existence as a result of the mass mobilization, I propose to use the concept of "situational group," referring to the

[7] Franklyn Griffiths, "A Tendency Analysis of Soviet Policy-Making," in Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths, eds., Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 335–77.

[8] For the factional model, see W. Whitson, "The Field Army in Chinese Communist Military Politics," China Quarterly , no. 46, 1963, 668–99; Andrew Nathan, "A Factional Model for CCP Politics," China Quarterly , no. 53, 1973, 34–66; Tang Tsou, "Prolegomenon to the Studying of Informal Groups in CCP Politics," China Quarterly , no. 65, 1976, 98–113; Lucian Pye, The Dynamics of Factions and Consensus in Chinese Politics (Santa Monica, Ca.: Rand Corporation, 1981); Ralph W. Nicholas, "Faction: A Comparative Analysis," 55–74, and James C. Scott, "Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia," 123–46, both in Steffen W. Schmitt, James Scott, Carl Lande, and Laura Guasti, eds., Friends, Followers, and Faction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977).

position in which a group finds itself as a result of a particular state policy.^[9] This concept is particularly appropriate to Chinese revolutionary politics, which relies heavily on political power to change the entire social structure. Because of the decisive and omnipresent role of the party-state in China, many groups—for example, the poor and the unemployed, which in Western countries would be labeled sociological groups—are more accurately defined as situational groups. The members of a situational group may or may not have a common group identity, but they are keenly aware that their situation is the result of state policy.

One situational group was composed of victims of the CR—the purged. Although they were off the political stage for a while (depending on when they were rehabilitated), they constituted a coherent political group, and after Mao's death they became the "rehabilitated cadres" who regained power. Among them were different subgroups. Some were officially denounced as "renegades, spies, and traitors" and then expelled from the party (e.g., Liu Shaoqi). Others were condemned as "powerholders taking the capitalist road," imprisoned for a while, and then released (e.g., Deng Xiaoping). There was also a group of cadres who were criticized and put aside by the masses. Their cases were never officially concluded. This situational group had many personal reasons to challenge the validity of the CR. They recognized Mao's mistakes, while holding the Gang of Four and Lin Biao responsible for the hardships they had suffered.

A second group consisted of leaders who were criticized but never officially purged or demoted; despite the profound crisis, this group of cadres managed to survive. As purge and counter-purge continued, they became more important in the overall distribution of power. Three examples are Zhou Enlai, Li Xiannian, and Ye Jianying. Although they enjoyed close personal relations with Mao, they had ample sympathy for their less fortunate comrades whom the CR victimized. They had no reason to defend the CR other than protecting Mao's position in Chinese history.

A third group included cadres who occupied middle-echelon positions in the party-state at the beginning of the CR and who were promoted upward (regardless of their desires) as the purges

[9] William Gamson, Power and Discontent (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1968).

created vacancies at the top. As the de facto beneficiaries of the CR, they developed a deep personal loyalty to Mao, although they may have had personal reservations about some of his decisions. They tended to defend the CR on the whole, while rehabilitating some of its innocent victims as long as Mao's overall reputation was not undermined. Hua Guofeng and Wu De are examples of this type of cadre.

The fourth and last group consisted of those who initiated the CR and spurred the mass movement. Within this group were two subgroups: the Gang of Four, who controlled propaganda, and Lin Biao's group, which consisted mostly of military officers. Both used Mao's thought to initiate the CR, and both contributed to the development of Mao's personality cult. They had every reason to defend the CR while resisting the rehabilitation of cadres, particularly senior ones, whose return would threaten their own power position.

Analyzing the CR elite conflicts in terms of situational groups offers several advantages that the other types of conflict groups cannot. First, the situational group can accommodate ideological differences among the elites. Broadly speaking, the victims of the CR were on the right of the ideological spectrum, whereas the initiators of the CR were on the left. The survivors and the beneficiaries were between the two extremes. Second, the situational model can deal with the problem of size in conflict groups. Since the CR involved all the cadres as well as a large number of ordinary Chinese, the factional model based on personal ties cannot fully explain its dynamics and outcome. Moreover, unlike the factional model, the situational group does not assume that major elite conflicts are organized along cleavages based on informal ties, thus avoiding the question of formal and informal authorities. At the same time, the situational group differs from an opinion group—in which one can change one's position depending on the issue—because its members' positions are largely determined by their own political interests. In addition, the situational group possesses more group cohesiveness than the tendency group.

Most important, with this concept one can effectively address the question of rehabilitation, the issue around which elite conflicts centered. Understandably, all members of each situational group saw their crucial personal interests at stake in this issue.

The practice of allowing purged cadres to return to the political scene seems to be unique to the CCP, contrasting sharply with Stalin's policy.^[10] The traditional Chinese belief that man is fallible and yet also malleable through education provided the philosophical justification for cadre rehabilitation. Mao strengthened this traditional belief by emphasizing the need to reeducate cadres who made mistakes and, by departing from some Leninists' view that the Communist Party is infallible.^[11]

Rehabilitation, when fairly used, can perform several positive functions. It can work as a mechanism for administering justice and for allowing cadres to ask for reviews of their cases. Without such minimal protection, no political system can survive for long. At the same time, rehabilitation helps the decision-makers to correct their mistakes, assuage their guilt, and learn from their experiences. For ordinary Chinese citizens, the existence of rehabilitation can act to sustain their faith in the sincerity and, therefore, the legitimacy, of the party. Rehabilitation also benefits the Chinese political system by serving as a vehicle for keeping the cadres united by bringing back those who have strayed from the correct path. In addition, the political system can make good use of disgraced cadres' experiences.

Ideally, rehabilitation should be decided on the basis of the correctness or incorrectness of the original decision. But many political factors influenced each decision. First, whether the original decision was right or wrong depended on both subjective political judgment and the official line at a given moment. Since declaring a decision was wrong also raised the question of the decision-makers' culpability, those who made the decision usually defended it; the opposition, of course, capitalized on any problematic decisions.^[12]

Most important, whom to rehabilitate, particularly among

[10] In Chinese, "rehabilitation" (pingfan ) implies the overthrowing of an original disciplinary decision. The reasons most often cited for such reverals include false accusations, calumnious evidence, or excessively severe punishment. Rehabilitation usually entails the restoration of honor, the reinstatement of the disgraced cadre in his original position, and the payment of the wages he would have received during the period of his disgrace.

[11] Pingfan Ziliao Huibian (Guangdong, 19 January 1968), in Hongweibing Ziliao Huibian (Washington D.C.: Center for Chinese Research Material, 1978), 5010–5022.

[12] For this point, see Hong Yung Lee, Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution .

upper-echelon political leaders, had (and always has) profound ramifications for the distribution of power as well as for policy. For this reason the distribution of power at a given moment decisively influenced cadre rehabilitation, and whenever a major change occurred in power distribution, the demand for rehabilitation increased.

From the beginning, the CR was concerned with who should be purged and who should be protected or rehabilitated. Although all cadres were attacked in one way or another during the mass movement, some of the attacked managed to survive or to be liberated at early stages of the mass movement. More cadres were liberated when Mao proceeded to set up a new power structure in the form of a revolutionary committee. The three-in-one formula offered some cadres opportunities to join the new power structure as "revolutionary cadres." But who was qualified to be a "revolutionary cadre" was heatedly disputed, and every faction tried to maximize its power position in the new revolutionary committee by supporting the cadres of its own choice. Generally, PLA representatives in each unit, who had access to cadres' dossiers, made personnel decisions on cadres. The Jiang Qing group exerted its influence in the units with which it was concerned—generally those at central and provincial levels. However, at these high levels, the group could find only a few "revolutionary cadres," and worse still, most of them happened to have "other political problems."^[13] The radicals' influence over the formation of revolutionary committees at lower levels was further diluted because decisive authority came from the provincial revolutionary committee, which was dominated by local PLA leaders with the support of conservative mass organizations.

Large-scale "liberation" took place in 1968, when Mao launched the campaign to purify class ranks. Part of this campaign was known as "settling cases" (dingan ) by rendering official judgment on each cadre. At that time the cadres' status was uncertain: almost

[13] For instance, Liu Geping of Shansi, Wang Xiaoyu of Shandong, and Pan Fusheng of Heilongjiang joined the rebels. However, almost all such cadres had disappeared by the Ninth Party Congress (1969), probably because their "political problems which—referring to past mistakes"—made them vulnerable to attack by conservative forces.

all of them were criticized by the masses, but they were neither removed from their posts nor formally reinstated.

Unlike the case in earlier phases, this time new formal authorities—the revolutionary committees, Workers Mao's Thought Propaganda Teams, or the Military Affairs Commission—investigated each cadre, particularly focusing on class background (i.e., whether the one in their dossier was correct or not) and any suspicious past problems. Final decisions were supposed to be made impartially and objectively, but because of rampant factionalism, simplistic charges abounded, and even a single accusatory letter from the masses or an accusation in a mass meeting could trigger a lengthy process of investigation. As a result, many (what were later called) "false accusations," "mistaken decisions," and "trumped-up charges" were produced in the campaign.

After two years of chaotic mass mobilization, it was not easy to determine who was good and who was bad. All the decision-making bodies were split between radicals and conservatives, who violently disagreed even on basic standards of right and wrong. Moreover, two years of prolonged struggle exposed the weaknesses of every cadre. The chaos of the mass movement made it difficult to separate cadres who sought only their own interests from those who pursued what they believed to be the public good. Some cadres stood firmly for what they considered the right course, but unfortunately they turned out to be on the wrong side—at least from the Maoist viewpoint. Other cadres found in Mao's call to criticize powerholders a chance to vent accumulated resentments against their superiors. Still others were wholly opportunistic and unprincipled, changing their allegiance to whichever side seemed to be winning.

Another group of cadres, known as "wanderers" (xiaoyao pai ), withdrew from the whole movement, adopted an indifferent attitude, and tried to enjoy themselves. Many cadres who honestly reported their class origin and political history to the party were victimized because of "bad records"; those who managed to keep their records clean by lying claimed to be true revolutionaries. Dedicated Communist cadres who had faithfully carried out official policies prior to the CR drew heavier criticism from the masses than the "old good persons" (lao hao ren ). There was a compelling

need to untangle things and bring some semblance of justice and order to the situation. Veteran revolutionary cadres, who had led the Chinese revolution to success, came under fire from former KMT partisans. Many opportunists, who had compromised with the Japanese, the KMT, and the CCP, also surviveed the CR without having passed a "soul-searching test."

To make matters even more complex, the official definition of those to be purged was ambiguous and constantly changing. At the initial stage, the official target was defined as the "bourgeois academic authority." Then it expanded to include "powerholders taking the capitalist road," but the radicals and conservatives disagreed on how to define "capitalist roaders." The radicals insisted on purging all the cadres guilty of "the bourgeois reactionary line" (which suppressed the spontaneous mass movement). However, since almost 90 percent of the cadres had carried out the wrong line, the official policy changed to distinguishing between people who had willingly carried out the mistaken line and those who had simply followed orders coming down through regular organizational channels.^[14] Eventually, even those who were guilty of the bourgeois reactionary line were allowed to repent when the official description changed to "stubborn powerholders who took the capitalist road, but refused to reform."^[15]

Eventually the official category to be purged was reduced to "renegade and spy." Capitulating to the enemy by revealing party secrets and by selling out comrades, even when captured by the enemy, is against the principles of Leninism. To call a cadre a renegade is the most effective tactic for discrediting any party cadre in the public eye. Unlike other political mistakes, whose seriousness diminishes over time and with the introduction of different interpretations, being a renegade is an almost unforgivable sin. For this reason, Liu Shaoqi was labeled a renegade. Once applied, these labels substantially decreased anyone's chance for a verdict reversal, even when the political atmosphere changed drastically. In fact, those who had been condemned as renegades—mostly those from the "white" areas—were the last to be rehabilitated.

[14] Gongren Zaofan Bao , 10 April 1969.

[15] Renmin Ribao , 1 January 1964.

Figure. 1. 
Distribution of Rehabilitation by Years
Source . Sample includes all persons who served on any 
of the Eighth to the Twelfth Central Committees.

The concept of situational groups, their coalitions, and their conflict over the issue of rehabilitation are powerful tools in explaining the process and outcome of elite conflicts (see fig. 1).

Despite two years of mass mobilization, many old cadres managed to survive under the protection of Zhou Enlai. They represented continuity for the regime. Mao did not have either the capability or the will to purge all the old cadres. Besides their continued existence, there was the Lin Biao incident, which further weakened the political forces who had initiated the CR. The incident also deprived the Cultural Revolution Small Group, dominated by Madam Mao and her followers, of a powerful coalition partner, with whom it shared a common interest in safeguarding the accomplishments of the CR.

Immediately following Lin's death in 1971, a large number of senior cadres were rehabilitated (see figure 1). This intensified the Gang of Four's (Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen) conflicts with the survivors, in spite of Mao's effort to make the two groups cooperate. The Jiang Qing group renewed the mass campaign under the excuse of criticizing Confucius and Lin Biao in order to promote the CR rebels and to strengthen their power positions, while accusing the senior cadres

of attemping to "reverse the achievements of the CR." During this period of intensifying conflict, 1975–76, the rate of rehabilitation dropped substantially.

The Gang of Four even failed to form a coalition with the CR beneficiaries, whose political interests lay in limiting the number of rehabilitated cadres. Instead, the Gang's political ineptitude pushed the beneficiaries to form a coalition with the CR survivors—a coalition which eventually moved against the Gang. However, by cutting a potential partner, the CR's beneficiaries left themselves vulnerable. Moreover, they could not persuade the survivors of the CR to refrain from rehabilitating their old colleagues. As shown in the figure 1, the number of rehabilitated senior cadres increased in 1977 and 1978. When Deng Xiaoping, returned to power in 1978 and almost all the CR victims were reinstated, the de facto beneficiaries were doomed.

After easing out Hua Guofeng, Deng formed a broad coalition with the rehabilitated and the survivors, both of whom had suffered greatly. Since the winning coalition had no vested interest in the CR, it could totally repudiate it and initiate political and economic reforms. While inducing the rehabilitated cadres to retire through a special retirement system (see chapter 10), Deng Xiaoping promoted the younger generation of technocrats to the highest positions in the Thirteenth Party Congress.