Repudiation of the Personality Cult
A useful preliminary to any attempt to inherit charisma as an instrument of personal hegemony is an enhancement of the prestige of one's predecessor—such had been Stalin's ploy in launching a movement to honor the dead Lenin—and Hua Guofeng followed suit. It was particularly in Hua's interest to refurbish the cult, for his own emergence as Mao's successor could be justified by the infallibility premise and by little else. Hua's previous career had demonstrated him to be a competent implementer of radical policies at the provincial level and a political maneuverer capable of surviving in a chaotic political milieu without accumulating enemies. He had not distinguished himself as a policy innovator, however, and his arrest of the Gang of Four offered the first hint of political imagination or even inordinate ambition. His strategy for
legitimating his seizure of power seems to have been to arrogate to himself the superficial trappings of the cult, while reaffirming the infallibility premise with regard to the now-disembodied Thought of Mao Zedong, hoping thereby to establish an equation of himself with the late Chairman. Hua's first official act upon taking the helm was thus to appoint himself chairman of the committee to edit volume five of Mao's Selected Works and the committee to plan construction of a mausoleum to house Mao's crystal sarcophagus (like Stalin, Hua mummified his predecessor contrary to the latter's express wish). Pictures self-consciously associating Mao with Hua promptly appeared in public places, and Hua began to emulate Mao by adopting his hair style, bestowing exemplars of his calligraphy to various journal mastheads, visiting prominent sites in Mao's career itinerary (such as Jinggangshan), and otherwise appropriating his persona.
With respect to Mao's Thought, Hua ignored the dilemmas and theoretical dead ends into which it had gravitated during its terminal phase and reaffirmed its infallibility as of that time in which it could claim its greatest popular consensus: the 1950s. Within a year and a half after Mao's death no less than eight hitherto-unpublished Mao texts had made their appearance in People's Daily ; except during the Cultural Revolution itself, no previous period in PRC history had witnessed the publication of so many new texts.[2] In the first stages of the campaign to criticize the Gang of Four, the latter were accused of being "apparently left, but actually right," and placed in the Maoist framework of "two-line struggle" in direct line of descent from their old nemesis, Liu Shaoqi.[3] At the apparent instigation of Wang Dongxing,[4] Hua sponsored a joint editorial containing the famous "two whatevers": "Whatever policies
[2] Helmut Martin, Cult and Canon ; see also Krishna Prakash Gupta, "Mao after Mao: A Marxist Debate in China," in V. P. Dutt, ed., China : The Post-Mao View (New Delhi: Allied Pub., 1981), pp. 162–81.
[3] The continuing antirevisionist animus is also apparent in the editing of volume 5 of Mao's Selected Works . See Lu Shi, "'Mao xuan' wu juan yingdang chong shen chong bian" [The fifth volume of 'Mao's Selected Works' should be reexamined and reedited], ZM , no. 24 (October 1979): 16–17.
[4] In a self-examination presented at the preparatory meeting of the Fourth Plenum of the Eleventh CC (December 10, 1979), Wang said: "I proposed the 'two-whatever' theme when I was concurrently placed in charge of the Red Flag journal. This proposal came to my mind shortly after the downfall of the Gang of Four. . . . I believed that the overliberalization of the discussion on practice as the sole criterion for truth may lead to trouble. This belief was corroborated by incidents that erupted in various localities since the beginning of January this year as a result of the overemphasis on the emancipation of people's minds. Eventually, the bourgeois democracy and anarchist trend of thought flooded our country. As soon as the CC noted this, it proclaimed the four basic principles as 'an emergency measure' to stop this trend." Text of Wang Dongxing's Self-examination Paper Read at the Preparatory Meeting for the 4th Plenary Session of the 11th CCP CC," Dong Xi Fang , no. 12 (December 10, 1979): 10–12.
Chairman Mao had decided, we shall resolutely defend; whatever instructions he issued, we shall steadfastly obey."[5]
Hua's position unfortunately placed him at cross-purposes with Deng Xiaoping, for in the same "infallible" decision in which he appointed Hua to the heir-apparent positions of premier and first vice-chairman, Mao had also evicted Deng from all his Party and government posts. Deng therefore had an interest in negating the infallibility premise on which Hua was attempting to build his own legitimacy. Having just purged Mao's most enthusiastic supporters, and lacking any political base of his own, Hua was however thrown into the arms of the moderate senior Party-state cadres, most of whom had stronger bonds to Deng than to Hua. Aware of the threat that Deng posed to his position, Hua fell back on assertions of Mao's infallibility; for example, his "two whatevers" statement, issued on the anniversary of Hua's appointment as acting premier, seems to have come in response to strong pressure for Deng's rehabilitation in the public expressions of bereavement surrounding the first anniversary of Zhou Enlai's death. Deng adopted the tactic of expressing contrition and exaggerated deference in order to ingratiate himself with Hua, but he also took issue with the "two whatevers," before he had even been rehabilitated.[6] He seems to have permitted his criticisms to leak through the rumor network, for by April a group of military supporters in Guangzhou had drafted a manifesto evoking them.[7]
In response to this combination of blandishment and pressure, Hua finally agreed to rehabilitate Deng to all former positions, a decision formalized at the Third Plenum of the Tenth CC in July 1977. In his maiden speech to the CC, Deng questioned the common practice of quoting Mao out of context: "We must not distortedly take one sentence and use it as a slogan," he said. "Mao Zedong Thought must be taken as a whole and cannot be unilaterally applied. Chairman Mao's style is very
[5] "Study Well the Documents and Grasp the Key Link," RR , February 7, 1977.
[6] See Deng Xiaoping, "The 'Two Whatever' Policy Does Not Accord with Marxism" (May 24, 1977), in Beijing Review (hereinafter BR ), no. 33 (August 15, 1983): 14–15.
[7] "We have the Party Statutes and the Constitution before us; there are precise regulations as to how the Chairman of the Party, who will also be the commander-in-chief of our army and chief of state, is to be nominated. . . . The fact that comrade Hua Guofeng assumed the chairmanship of the MAC without calling the NPC into session, indeed without even calling a plenary session of the CC, can only be described as an emergency solution forced upon him by the circumstances, and also as a consequence of the struggle against the anti-Party clique, the Gang of Four. . . . We need not emphasize the point that Hua Guofeng assumed Chairmanship of the CC based on Mao's written remark, 'with you in charge, I am at ease.' These words, be they glittering as gold, cannot represent anything but the personal opinion of Chairman Mao; they can by no means be rated as the expression of the will of the Party, army or people." "Proposal of the Canton PLA Party Committee and the Guang-dong Provincial Party Committee Concerning Certain Topical Questions," trans. in Der Spiegel (Hamburg), April 18, 1977, pp. 161–64.
lively and popular and sometimes he liked to say something humorous."[8] Deng's influence was perceptible in a series of articles that appeared at the time of the first anniversary of Mao's death, stressing the same theme, and in a gradual change in the public handling of Mao's writings and statements. Nie Rongzhen, for example, wrote an important article arguing that Mao Zedong Thought should be studied only in terms of its spirit, and not through isolated quotations that disregarded their spatial and temporal context.[9]
By December 1977 it had become apparent that tighter constraints were being placed on the publication of Mao texts. By April 1978, the press had ceased printing all Mao quotations in boldface type, and at about the same time People's Daily desisted from carrying a daily quotation in a special nameplate at the top of the page.[10] There were fewer quotations, and Mao's name was not inevitably invoked in support of particular policies. Only three major writings by Mao were released in 1978; one was his 1962 speech to seven thousand cadres, in which he discussed the importance of democratic centralism and offered his own self-criticism (hitherto unpublished) for errors committed during the Great Leap; the second (a 1958 piece entitled "Uninterrupted Revolution") actually stressed economic reconstruction through technological revolution (Mao's two letters to his sons, published at about this time, also stressed the need for science and technology); and the third, Mao's 1941 talk to a women's group, upheld the primacy of actual practice and investigation in justifying a theoretical viewpoint. On the second anniversary of Mao's death, only three poems were released; by the fourth anniversary, Mao was totally ignored in Beijing.[11]
But Deng's most explicit and theoretically ambitious challenge to the doctrine of charismatic infallibility took the form of a seemingly academic debate concerning the epistemological issue of the correct "criterion of truth" (zhenli de biaozhun ).[12] The origins of this debate can be traced all the way back to Deng's brief concluding speech at the Eleventh Party Congress in September 1977, in which he emphasized the need to "revive . . . the practice of seeking truth from facts."[13] This theme was reflected in the article "Practice Is the Sole Criterion of Truth," which first
[8] Ming Bao , August 16, 1977, p. 1; and August 17, 1977, p. 1.
[9] Nie Rongzhen in RR , September 5, 1977; see also GM , August 29, 1977, as trans. in Survey of the People's Republic of China Press (hereinafter SPRCP ), no. 6431 (September 27, 1977): 77–80.
[10] AFP Hong Kong, January 10, 1978.
[11] NCNA, June 30, 1978; NCNA, December 25, 1978; NCNA, December 12, 1978; RR , January 16, 1979; NCNA, September 8, 1978; NCNA, September 7, 1978; all cited in Gupta, "Mao after Mao."
[12] See CNA , no. 1134 (September 22, 1978).
[13] Deng Xiaoping, "Concluding Speech," in The Eleventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China (Documents) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), pp. 192–93.
appeared in Guangming Daily on May 11, 1978, and was reprinted shortly thereafter in People's Daily . Although most such articles were composed by the Theory Study Group at the Central Party School in Beijing under the patronage of Hu Yaobang (deputy director of the school under Hua), it was (ten months) later revealed that the "special commentator" who wrote this seminal article was one Hu Fuming, director of the philosophy department at Nanjing University and deputy secretary of the department's general Party branch, who voluntarily submitted it to Guangming Daily . The newspaper in turn referred it to Hu Yaobang, who edited it in consultation with the author and published it.
The central issue dealt with in this article was whether dogma might be revised. The answer, the author declared, was that it could: Marxism recognized no "forbidden zones," and those that had been erected by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four (or Hua Guofeng?) were anti-Marxist. Hu Fuming later explained that the article had become necessary because after Mao's death many of his colleagues were constantly on tenterhooks about possible violation of one Mao quotation or another at a time when no authoritative arbiter remained available to resolve such uncertainties, leaving them unable to decide the correctness of any policy strictly on the merits of the issue. Truth cannot become its own yardstick, he argued, but must constantly be validated anew in the course of practice. The implications of this line of thinking, if taken to its logical conclusion, was that "practice" exists independently of any revolutionary theory, that "facts" are value-free, and that Mao's Thought was valid only with reference to the historical milieu that had produced it.[14]
Opposition quickly materialized, led by Wang Dongxing, Zhang Pinghua (director of the Propaganda Department), Wu Lengxi (former People's Daily editor), and Xiong Fu and Hu Sheng (Red Flag editor and assistant general editor, respectively).[15] But opposition never became
[14] See Oskar Weggel, "Ideologie im nachmaoistischen China: Versuch einer Systematisierung," CA , January 1983, pp. 19–40.
[15] Wu Shengzhi's "Zhonggong dui Mao Zedong sixiang pingjia de xin fazhan" [New developments in the evaluation of Mao Zedong thought], DX , no. 1 (October 1978), lists the other important articles in the discussion of the criterion of truth through the fall of 1978. The opponents of "practice as the sole criterion" held Mao's Thought to be, if not the sole criterion, certainly a relatively definitive one. They controlled HQ , and the Party journal conspicuously avoided endorsing this epistemological line (until the summer of 1979; see the self-criticism published at that time, "Conscientiously Make Up the Missed Lessons in the Discussions of the Criterion of Truth," HQ , no. 7 [July 1979]). On National Day (October 1, 1978), for the first time since 1967 there was no joint editorial, signaling the gravity of the split. See Chen Chi, "'Hongqi ' zazhi qiguai de chenmo" [The strange silence of Red Flag ], ZM , no. 13 (November 1978): 16–17. In September, Wang Dongxing and Zhang Pinghua went so far as to impound the first issue of Zhongguo Qingnian [China youth] since the Cultural Revolution for its selection of the participants in the Tiananmen demonstrations as model activists against the Gang of Four (both Hua and Deng happened to be out of the country at the time). See Qi Xin article in QN , no. 106 (November 1978): 6–13.
theoretically articulate (this had been ingeniously precluded by the use of Mao's own words to underpin this delimitation of their theoretical significance), whereas Deng Xiaoping publicly announced his approval in a speech to a PLA work conference on June 2 (published a week later).[16] Deng's cue elicited a series of echoing affirmations from his supporters throughout the summer and fall. At the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Deng Liqun and Zhou Yang (a vice-chairman and an adviser, respectively) gave speeches of endorsement. The first secretaries of the various provincial Party committees and the MR commanders each contributed an article on the importance of practice as a criterion of truth. Many organizations and provinces held a large educational conference for cadres, using Hu's article and Deng's speech as study documents. The journals Philosophical Studies and Economic Studies convened conferences on the topic. Beginning in October, ancillary themes were introduced, such as the critique of the "theory of genius"—the notion that thought can transcend historical circumstances and apply to all times and places.[17] In terms redolent of Marx's attack on religious authority, reformers began to characterize the belief in infallible leadership as a "superstition" or "fetish" devoid of "scientific" basis. For example, one article drew implicit parallels between the European Inquisition and thought control in China during the period of the Gang of Four.[18] In repudiating the "Gang's" notion (actually Mao's) that "the political line decides everything," or that there were certain transitional periods when "spirit, not the material foundation, is the primary condition," reformers tended to derogate the role of political leadership to that of the competent management of socio-economic interests.[19] One article even lampooned the "foolish old man who moved mountains" for his "imbecilic" lack of realism, pointing out that the happy ending to the tale requires a leap into "superstition" (i.e., two angels come and bear the mountain away).[20]
The Third Plenum, held in Beijing in December 1978 after a long and apparently contentious central work conference (November 10–December 13), heralded a breakthrough in the critique of the cult in at least three respects. First, the CC "highly appraised" the discussion
[16] Editorial, RR , June 10, 1978, p. 2.
[17] The major article on this theme is by Special Commentator, "The Struggle of the Theory of Genius and the Theory of Practice," RR , October 30, 1978, p. 2.
[18] Yan Jiaqi, "Religion, Rationality, and Practice: Visiting Three 'Law Courts' on the Question of Truth in Different Eras," GM , September 14, 1978, pp. 3–4.
[19] See Hong Yuanpeng, "Hypotheses on the Inner Springs of Productive Forces," Sixiang Zhanxian [Ideological front] (Kunming), no. 5 (October 20, 1978): 1–16; see also Brantly Womack, "Chinese Political Economy: Reversing the Polarity," Pacific Affairs 54, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 57–82.
[20] Liu Maoying (commentator), "A New Explanation of the Story of Yu Gong Who Removed the Mountains," Wenhui Bao , August 15, 1980.
on the criterion of truth and affirmed such guiding principles as the emancipation of the mind and seeking truth from facts. Second, Mao's infallibility was denied, both in the abstract (by criticizing the "two whatevers") and by implication, overruling his verdicts in various specific cases: the Tiananmen Incident was deemed "revolutionary" rather than "counterrevolutionary," and some five hundred thousand victims of the 1957 Anti-Rightist movement were rehabilitated, as were such highlevel purge victims as Peng Dehuai and Peng Zhen. Third, Hua Guofeng publicly forswore the cult he himself had attempted to appropriate, advocating that all members of the leadership henceforth be addressed as "comrade" rather than by title, and that no opinion expressed by Party leaders should be called an "instruction" (zhishi ).[21]
Throughout 1979 and 1980, as the frequency of public references to Mao or his Thought underwent a steady secular decline,[22] elite critiques of his leadership escalated with seeming inexorability. Whereas the Third Plenum had merely deferred discussion of Mao's responsibility for the Cultural Revolution, in the spring of 1979 Wang Ruoshui gave a devastating internal speech, "The Important Lesson of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Is the Need to Oppose Individual Superstition" (geren mixin ), which attributed that movement (now evaluated in purely negative terms) to Mao's ideological imbalance and to the overweening personal power he had arrogated.[23] In Ye Jianying's public address on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic in October 1979 (reportedly drafted by Hu Yaobang after months of mutual consultation and approved by the Fourth Plenum prior to delivery), Mao's errors—now referred to as "faults" rather than "shortcomings and mistakes"—were referred to on six points: (1) broadening the scope of the attack against the rightists in 1957; (2) encouraging the "Communist wind" during the Three Red Banners (1958–60); (3) leading the intra-Party struggle against Peng Dehuai in 1959; (4) launching the Cultural Revolution; (5) artificially creating or widening the scope of class struggle; and (6) indulging the personality cult.[24] At the Fifth
[21] See Wang Jienan, "Why We May Call the Third Plenum a Great Turning Point of Farreaching Significance in the Whole History of Our Party since the Establishment of the People's Republic of China," Wenhui Bao (Shanghai), July 17, 1981, p. 3.
[22] See L. Dittmer, "Charismatic Leadership and the Crisis of Succession: Changing Conceptions of Legitimacy in the PRC," unpub. paper presented at the Association for Asian Studies, Los Angeles, Calif., February 1979.
[23] Wang Ruoshui, "The Greatest Lesson of the Cultural Revolution Is That the Personality Cult Should Be Opposed," Mingbao Yuekan , no. 2 (February 1, 1980): 2–15.
[24] Ye Jianying, at Fourth Plenum of the Eleventh CC, Speech at the Meeting in Celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the Founding of the People's Republic of China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1979), pp. 5, 16–17, 19, 20–21, et passim . After Hu drafted the report, the draft was sent to leading strata in various localities, to various ministers, secretaries ofprovincial committees, and secretaries of Party committees of institutes of higher learning, a total of more than a thousand persons, who made suggestions (the entire drafting process took three months). Then Deng and Ye revised it, whereupon it was taken to the Fourth Plenum for discussion and passed. Amid many favorable comments about Mao and some fairly low-key criticisms (e.g., "we had become imprudent"), the speech introduces the notion that Mao Zedong Thought is a collective rather than an individual product.
Plenum of the Eleventh CC (February 1980), Mao's old nemesis Liu Shaoqi was posthumously rehabilitated, and although the "mistakes" of this erstwhile "top Party person in authority taking the capitalist road" were not unreservedly absolved, this reversal of verdicts inevitably reflected adversely on Mao's judgment (Mao's own "faults" had meanwhile come to be referred to as "serious mistakes" [yanzhong de cuowu ]).[25] Finally, the Gang of Four and six surviving participants in the Lin Biao conspiracy were placed on public trial in the fall of 1980, and although some care was taken (in deference to Hua Guofeng) to limit the process to the defendants (who had committed "crimes," as distinct from "political errors"), Jiang Qing herself sought refuge in an Eichmann defense, referring to herself as the Chairman's running dog.[26] These object lessons destroyed Mao's symbolic utility for those seeking to salvage some ideological flotsam from his radical platform, as well as fatally undermining the legitimacy of Hua Guofeng's "feudal" succession. The latter formally retired from his chairmanship at the Sixth Plenum.[27]
In the spring of 1981 the regime attempted to call a halt to the process of de-Maoization and formulate a final verdict on the Chairman's histor-
[25] Although Liu was honored at a memorial service two months later as "the first to advance the concept of Mao Zedong Thought," the impression of a theoretical "contradiction" between Mao and Liu was not easily allayed. Among the top leaders involved, such a contradiction was explicitly acknowledged. The memorial ceremony reportedly had to be postponed for two weeks because of the objections of Liu's widow, Wang Guangmei, to a line in the eulogy referring to her late husband as Mao's "close comrade-in-arms." The phrase was deleted. NYT , May 18, 1980, p. 13; see also Dittmer, "Death and Transfiguration: Liu Shaoqi's Rehabilitation and Contemporary Chinese Politics," Journal of Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (May 1981): 455–80.
[26] Perceptive reportage on the "great trial" may be found in Luo Bing, "Da shenxun taiqian muhou" [On the stage and behind the scenes of the great trial], ZM , no. 38 (December 1980): 7–11; Luo Bing, "Beijing da shenxun zhongzhong" [About Beijing's great trial], ZM , no. 37 (November 1980): 8–10; Liu Ying, "Tingqian muhou de Jiang Qing" [Jiang Qing at court and behind the scenes], ZM , no. 40 (February 1981): 18–21; Li Mingfa, "Zhonggong gaoceng dui panjue Jiang Qing de zhengyi" [The dispute among high-ranking Chinese Communist officials concerning the sentence of Jiang Qing], ZM , no. 40 (February 1981): 22–24; QI Xing, "Shirenbang' da shen de youguan wenti" [Issues concerning the trial of the 'Gang of 10'"], Qishi Niandai , December 1980, pp. 8–14; Ding Wang, "Beijing 'da shen pan' de falü genju boruo" [The legal basis of the Beijing 'Great Trial' is weak], Dangdai , no. 3 (November 15, 1980): 28–30.
[27] See Luo Bing, "Hua Guofeng cizhi muhou" [Behind the scenes of Hua Guofeng's resignation], ZM , no. 39 (January 1980): 7–10; and Luo, "Shei yao qudai Hua Guofeng diwei" [Who will replace Hua Guofeng?], ZM , no. 39 (January 1981): 12–13.
ical contribution, thereby establishing an ideological consensus upon which to consolidate its legitimacy. The main components of this consensus consisted of a selective restoration of Mao's reputation and a more flexible interpretation of his Thought. The result has been a balanced and multidimensional portrait unique in the annals of Chinese political hagiology.
The article by Huang Kecheng (who had been purged along with Peng Dehuai in 1959), "About Mao and Mao's Thought," published by Liberation Army Daily on April 10, 1981, to coincide with a major resurgence of military leftism (including the criticism of Bai Hua, to be examined later), set the basic themes for this more "balanced" interpretation. Huang did not deny Mao's errors ("in his later years, Chairman Mao had some shortcomings and made some mistakes, even some serious mistakes. . . . When I had the chance of being with him in 1958, I felt that he had overtaxed his brain."), but he did attempt to compensate for this by celebrating his virtues, placing errors in a secondary position.[28] Huang's article, reportedly written at the instigation of Deng Xiaoping, prompted a small freshet of similar memorials, usually from former military figures such as Xiao Hua, Wei Guoqing, or He Changgong (deputy commander of the PLA Academy), whose usual pattern was to devote nine-tenths of the essay to a recollection of some particular episode that revealed Mao's heroic or endearing qualities and then insert a few sentences adverting to errors in his "later years."[29]
The Sixth Plenum endorsed the reevaluation inaugurated by the PLA in its Resolution on CPC History (1949 –81 ). This epoch-making document, reportedly drafted by Deng Liqun (Liu Shaoqi's former secretary, now chairman of the CC Propaganda Department) on the basis of a year's
[28] Translated in FBIS , April 10, 1981, pp. K5–14. Also see Jiang Xinli, "Cong Huang Kecheng zhuanwen kan Zhonggong pi-Mao yundong" [Looking at the criticize Mao movement from the perspective of Huang Kecheng's speech], Feiqing Yuebao 23, no. 11 (May 1982).
[29] Thus Yang Dezhi, in a July 1981 HQ article: "After the decade of disorder in the country, some comrades have a misunderstanding that Comrade Mao Zedong made mistakes in the 10-year 'Great Cultural Revolution.' However, if we judge his activities as a whole, he made indelible contributions. . . . Our Party and the people of all nationalities in the country would have had to grope in the dark much longer had it not been for comrade Mao Zedong and the Party CC he led more than once to rescue the Chinese revolution from grave danger and chart the firm, correct political course for the Party and the army. . . . Of course, our advocacy of upholding Mao Zedong Thought is by no means an attempt to restore the erroneous leftist ideology which prevailed prior to he Third Plenum." HQ , July 1981, translated in FBIS , July 7, 1981, pp. K9–K10. Other contributions to this wave of more favorable reevaluations include Song Renqiong (member of the Secretariat and director of the CC Organization Department), in a RR article, June 30, 1981, trans. in FBIS , July 16, 1981, p. K8; Xu Xiangqian (MAC vice-chairman), HQ , October 1979, trans. in BBC Summary of World Broadcasts Part 3 Far East , no. 6249 (October 19, 1979), p. BII/4.
discussion and widespread consultation before submission to the CC, attempted to stake off limits to further erosion of Mao's reputation[30] and to define the "living soul of Mao Zedong Thought" from the "correct" perspective of the post-Mao leadership. The "key link" was no longer class struggle, which was subordinated in importance to the contradiction between "advanced" and "backward" sectors of the economy. Mao's Thought could "boil down" to three basic points: "to seek truth from facts, the mass line, and [national] independence."[31]
Mao's personal role in the formulation of his Thought is relegated to far more modest proportions. Mao's contribution, the resolution makes clear, has only historical reference; his more sweeping generalizations conceivably have contemporary relevance but may only be construed with the exegetical assistance of the Party. Mao's Thought is not a set of fixed principles but a "scientific system"; that is to say, its content is open to periodic reinterpretation in the light of subsequent "scientific" (i.e., authoritatively validated) experience. It is by no means a "work of genius" by a single heroic leader, as had successively been alleged by Lin Biao and by the Gang of Four (as in their allegorical apotheosis of Qin Shihuang), but rather the by-product of the "collective struggle of the Party and the people," to which "many outstanding leaders of our Party" also made contributions, including such erstwhile renegades as Liu Shaoqi. Mao Zedong himself is thus conceptually distinguishable from his Thought and indeed sometimes violated his own correct line.
Thus the leadership's handling of the infallibility premise seems to have gone through three phases in the post-Mao period. The first phase was marked by an attempt to maintain the popular belief in Mao's flawless decision-making capability and in the privileged epistemological status of his Thought, in order to justify his succession arrangements and in hopes that this infallibility might in time be imputed to the next Chairman. This attempt failed, for several reasons. First, it failed to take into account that popular belief in Mao's infallibility had already eroded over the previous decade. Second, it revised the content of Mao's Thought in a more moderate (and less distinctive) direction even while claiming unadulterated commitment to it. And finally, the new defender of the faith lacked the political base and skills to maintain his position when challenged by a stronger adversary—the presumption of infallibility proved to be based upon power rather than vice versa.
[30] See the analysis in Feiqing Yuebao 24, no. 1 (July 1981): 1; see also Zhang Zhenbang, "Analysis of the 6th Plenum of the 11th CC," in ibid., pp. 9–14; and David S. G. Goodman, "The 6th Plenum of the 11th CC of the CCP: Look Back in Anger?" CQ , no. 87 (September 1981): 518–28.
[31] Resolution , p. 67 et passim ; see also Editorial department, "The General Content and Far-reaching Significance of the 'Resolution,'" Banyue Tan [Semimonthly talks], no. 13 (July 10, 1981): 3–9, 26.
The second phase witnessed displacement of the infallibility premise by pragmatism of a relatively pure form, as rationalized in the defense of practice as the sole criterion of truth. This motto legitimated an outburst of political and intellectual experimentation, which soon trespassed the threshold of official tolerance, unleashing an ideological backlash to be examined later.
During the third and so far final phase, the leadership has sought to reclaim and institutionalize at least a prima facie assumption of infallibility, vested however in formal offices rather than in their incumbents. The ongoing critique of Mao Zedong's policy errors has been arrested in order to preserve popular faith in the political order he after all did much to create. Although Deng Xiaoping has clearly emerged as first among equals in the successor regime,[32] he seems to have adhered to the discipline of collective leadership (as evinced, for example, in his policy zigzags, which conform to a shifting Politburo majority), and there are no signs of any attempt to resuscitate the cult of personality.