Prospectus

The sweeping policy reversals of the post-Mao period may be historically comprehended in one of at least three ways. The first would attribute change to an oscillatory pattern that has long characterized the Chinese policy process. There are several variants of oscillatory explanation, the most popular of which is the bivariate "two-line struggle" model: policy is under constant contention between "moderate" and "radical" elites, and the policy "line" oscillates according to factional vicissitudes.^[11] There are also trivariate,^[12] even quadrivariate^[13] versions of this model. Common to all is an attempt to reduce the range of policy variation to a limited number of possible alternatives, variation among which is however cyclical and recurrent rather than secular, sometimes following a predicted itinerary, sometimes aleatory. The future is in any case certain, for it has been seen in the past. The second explanation conceives of the post-Mao transformation in terms of the restoration of a tradition , con-

[11] There are actually two versions of this explanation, one of which focuses on the causal impact of elite factionalism, the other on the internal dynamics of the process of implementation. For good expositions of the former, see Parris H. Chang, Power and Policy in China (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978, 2d enlarged ed.); also Byungjoon Ahn, Chinese Politics and the Cultural Revolution: Dynamics of Policy Processes (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976); and Harry Harding, "Maoist Theories of Policy-Making and Organization," in Thomas W. Robinson, ed., The Cultural Revolution in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 113–65. The best exemplar of the latter is G. William Skinner and Edwin O. Winckler's "Compliance Succession in Rural Communist China: A Cyclical Theory," in Amitai Etzioni, ed., A Sociological Reader on Complex Organizations (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969, 2d ed.), pp. 410–38; see also E. O. Winckler, "Policy Oscillation in the People's Republic of China: A Reply, "CQ no. 68 (December 1976): 734–51.

[12] Dorothy Solinger, for example, perceives a cyclical conflict among bureaucrats, who favor increasing state control, marketeers, who give top priority to economic productivity, and radicals, who emphasize class conflict. See her Chinese Business under Socialism: The Politics of Domestic Commerce , 1949–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

[13] In his discussion of elite attitudes toward the issue of bureaucratization, Harry Harding finds a split among rationalizers, radicals, and proponents of external remedial and internal remedial measures. See his Organizing China: The Problem of Bureaucracy , 1949–1976 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981).

sisting of established worldviews, policy priorities, organizational predispositions, and cultural patterns, after an unfortunate but temporary radical deviation. That tradition, according to the most widely credited variant of this paradigm, represents a politically disciplined consensus around rapid economic growth and distributive equity, which for a variety of reasons was interrupted by an irrational outburst of radical egalitarianism and ideological inquisition.^[14] The minority variant deems the revolutionary tradition to have been so corrupted that its survival was at stake, and thus badly needing revitalization, from which the post-Mao changes are a regrettable relapse.^[15] Common to both variants of the restoration scenario (as well as the oscillatory model) is a conception of change within a familiar repertoire. The third explanation, on the other hand, views the post-Mao changes as marking the end of the epoch of continuing revolution and the dawning of a new era .

This study, while conceding elements of continuity and cyclical recurrence, is inclined to the third interpretation. The oscillatory patterns of the Maoist era defined themselves against a horizon of continuing revolution, in the context of which any tradition was more a forlorn hope than a stable reality. "Continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat" retained the revolutionary animus of the pre-Liberation era by sustaining the drive to smash the structure of authority, though that structure had to be continously redefined. The functional requisites of that drive—charismatic leadership, an illegitimate authority structure, and continual mass mobilization—may be viewed as perishable assets. The sequence and manner of their exhaustion (either by successful accomplishment or by a convincing demonstration of unfeasibility) may be expected to have affected the form the revolution took in its successive stages.

Although the chapters follow in approximate chronological sequence, each chapter intends to make specific points in an argument, not simply to provide an historical narrative. To this end, such evidence will be marshaled as seems necessary to corroborate those points being made, and not too much more than that. If some stages in the sequence emerge in relatively lush empirical detail, this is because they have not yet been adequately covered in the literature. Thus the late Cultural Revolution period, which really brought home to all participants the utter folly of

[14] Perhaps most persuasively articulated in Frederick C. Teiwes, Leadership , Legitimacy , and Conflict in China: From a Charismatic Mao to the Politics of Succession (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1984); the same thesis is implicit in his Politics and Purges in China: Rectification and the Decline of Party Norms, 1950 –1965 (White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1979).

[15] See Charles Bettelheim and Neil Burton, China since Mao (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978); also Bob Avakian, The Loss in China and the Revolutionary Legacy of Mao Tsetung (Chicago: RCP Pub., 1978).

persevering with the "principles laid down," will be analyzed rather exhaustively, whereas the early Cultural Revolution, about which more ink has probably been spilt than any other period of comparable length in modern Chinese history, rates only one chapter.

The first phase of China's continuing revolution marked the heyday of the engineering approach. While the leadership pursued its war against society quite ruthlessly via unpredictable policy lurches, an uneasy consensus was maintained within the vanguard on an agenda of centrally planned, hierarchically organized, sequentially paced transformation. The successes achieved during this period not only convinced the leaders of the basic correctness of the policy course they had set but imparted the sense of self-confidence that later allowed them to depart from this course, steering the revolution into new and more hazardous waters. Chapter 2 consists of an analysis of charismatic leadership and mass mobilization during this first phase, relying on a combination of previously published sources and the more recent findings that have emerged in the post-Mao period.

Chapter 3 is concerned with structures of authority during this phase—both the residual structure against which the revolution continued to be directed and the emergent structure being constructed by the CPC. In the course of the remarkable initial successes and concluding failures of this phase, the residual structure began losing credibility as a target, while at the same time the more aversive features of the emergent CPC regime were becoming more visible. The first part of this chapter is concerned with changes in the objective structures, whereas the second investigates critical perception of those changes—particularly the ideas advanced by Mao Zedong, who seems to have devoted considerably more thought to these developments than his colleagues.

Chapter 4 consists of a reexamination of the early phase of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–68). That attempt was to result in the most comprehensive revival of the storming approach since the late 1920s, albeit within a quite new and quite different context. Charismatic leadership became split from the bureaucracy; mass mobilization was pursued more or less spontaneously in response to vague elite cues, using a partially autonomous media network to mobilize an almost fully autonomous factional jumble of "revolutionary masses." The structure of authority against which the revolution was pitted was redefined to amalgamate rhetorically the prerevolutionary authority structure with that group of moderate bureaucrats within the Party who had opposed Mao, thereby conceptualizing a "capitalist road," or "bourgeois reactionary line." Whereas previous accounts of this great upheaval have typically viewed it as a somewhat unconventional purge (which it certainly was), this treatment will attempt to place it in the context of a serious attempt by the dominant ("Maoist") faction of the CPC leadership to

"continue the revolution" in the cultural superstructure (which it also was). The purpose is not merely to summarize the rich store of literature on this period but if possible to supplement it with an analysis of its neglected cultural dimension—which, it is argued, informed mundane political behavior. The assumption is that amid the disintegration of political structures, ideology came to assume a compensating importance; accordingly, we employ a methodology derived from structural linguistics to analyze the polemical rhetoric, showing how it symbolically reduplicated the authority structures it aimed to destroy.

If 1966–68 was the heyday of storming, the 1968–76 period might be termed "revisionist storming." Without abandoning the basic commitment to permanent mobilization as the only way to preserve revolutionary vitality, the leadership attempted to adapt this approach to the functional imperatives of self-sustaining economic development—albeit with indifferent success. Due to a dearth of relevant scholarly literature, and because developments during this period are so crucial to our understanding of how the prerequisites of revolution were ultimately exhausted, these developments receive scrutiny in no fewer than three chapters. Chapter 5 is concerned with charismatic leadership and the difficulties involved in attempting to arrange for its post-mortem survival. Chapter 6 focuses on the problems of reconciling mass mobilization with both thought reform and economic production. Chapter 7 examines the problems inherent in reconstructing authority at a time when authority structures remained under intense critical scrutiny and periodic public assault. These three chapters are based on a relatively comprehensive collection of primary and secondary sources, supplemented by interviews with former participants.

The final chapter pursues the revolution to its ambiguous denouement, in which it is at once discontinued and reaffirmed. After a brief interregnum during which Hua Guofeng fruitlessly attempted to revive the engineering approach, CPC theorists seem to have arrived at the conclusion that the revolution has in effect burnt out—though there is still considerable ambivalence about this conclusion, arising from the desire to preserve certain revolutionary values and legitimations. If this essay is correct in assigning overriding importance to the effort to continue the revolution during the first three decades after the seizure of power, such ambivalence is understandable. This "postrevolutionary" phase is an extremely formative one in China's political development, during which one paradigm is being abandoned or at least fundamentally reevaluated and various possibilities for a fresh start explored, with unprecedented openness. The People's Republic may long be expected to bear the stigmata of the tumultuous epoch that gave it birth, either by incorporating them (as in the yearning for emancipation and greater personal liberty) or by seeking to repress them (as in the abhorrence of chaos).