by Joel Andreas
The following is an outline of the presentation I made at the conference held to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on June 9-10, 2006. The brevity of this outline, unfortunately, prevents a more nuanced discussion and the presentation of evidence.
The Cultural Revolution was the culmination of Mao Zedong's efforts to find an effective means to implement "mass supervision” over officials of the Chinese Communist Party. Before the Cultural Revolution, these efforts had typically involved top-down mobilization by the party and mass organizations under its leadership. Local union leaders (and employee representative congresses they convened) were nominally supposed to mobilize supervision by employees over work unit party leaders, but their ability to do so was fundamentally limited because they operated under the direct leadership of the unit party committee. The deployment of work teams by higher level party authorities was designed to circumvent the power of local party committees. During party rectification and anti-corruption campaigns (such as the Socialist Education Movement), party work teams temporarily set aside local party committees and mobilized peasants, students, and workers to criticize local leaders. The work team method was highly effective in combating corruption and enforcing party discipline. Nevertheless, by 1966 Mao had concluded that this method was incapable of preventing the emergence of a privileged bureaucratic class composed of party officials.
During the early years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1968), Mao encouraged the formation of self-organized "rebel” groups in every school, workplace and village. These organizations, with Mao's support, quickly undermined the authority of local party officials. Local leaders were criticized (and often cruelly humiliated) by their subordinates and they were required to obtain the support of rebels before they were allowed to return to positions of power. Because the rebel groups were independent of the party organization, they could effectively mobilize mass supervision over party officials. This freewheeling movement, however, led to a violent struggle for power between rebel and conservative factions. In the summer of 1968, Mao called on all factions to disband and authorized the suppression of those that did not.
Why didn't Mao support the rebels taking power? I believe there were three reasons. First, this was impossible. As became very clear after the Wuhan Incident, the party organization and the military would never have allowed it. Second, he didn't trust the rebels. There was no reason to believe that once these young insurgents had power they would behave any better than the revolutionaries who had taken power seventeen years earlier. Third, he wanted them to continue to play the role of rebels. During the late years of the Cultural Revolution (1968-1976), Mao constructed an elaborate arrangement that institutionalized factional contention, pitting rebels against administrators. Veteran cadres were returned to positions of administrative power, while rebels were placed in institutional positions that allowed them to mobilize the masses to criticize the veteran cadres. Mao first brought back the old leaders and then he supported a series of radical campaigns against them.
One manifestation of the institutionalized factional contention during this period can be seen in the system of governance at Tsinghua University. Power was divided between rehabilitated university officials and a "workers propaganda team” composed of soldiers and factory workers brought in from outside. The propaganda team, aligned with the radical faction in the party, mobilized students and university workers to criticize teachers and university leaders. The resulting system of governance was very different from the one-way top-down system that prevailed at the university before 1966, and it did institutionalize elements of mass supervision. In practice, however, nobody could criticize the leaders of the propaganda team, which led to a phenomenon that might be called "sycophantic rebellion:” criticizing one set of leaders to curry favor with another (more powerful) set of leaders. (A more detailed analysis of the results of institutionalized factional contention at Tsinghua University during the late Cultural Revolution can be found in an article published in the January 2006 issue of The China Journal.) [Please include a link to the PDF file of this article.]
Tsinghua was one of the few places where the radical faction held sway. In other places, former rebels had been appointed – together with veteran cadres – to serve on "revolutionary committees” but had little real power, while in some places rebels were excluded from power altogether. It seems likely that where mass supervision and radical political campaigns were organized from above (as they were at Tsinghua) they had sycophantic characteristics, and where they were organized from below they were weak and precarious. Looking back, it's possible to identify two key weaknesses in this system of institutionalized factional contention. First, there were no independent mass organizations. Second, the entire system depended on Mao Zedong (and it was quickly dismantled - with the purge of the radical faction - after his death in 1976).
I am beginning to think that two key decisions Mao made during the early years of the Cultural Revolution were counterproductive to the aim of finding an effective means of mass supervision. The first decision was made in January 1967, when Mao called on rebels to seize power from local party committees. This greatly diminished the power of local party officials, but it also set in place a life-and-death power struggle between the rebels and the party organization, which led to unprincipled maneuvering and violence. The rebels could not possibly win this contest, and it is unlikely that Mao would ever have supported such an outcome (as he made clear when he vetoed the Shanghai Commune). He never intended to overthrow the Communist Party; instead he wanted to establish a force that could make its officials accountable to those under their administration.
The second decision was made in August 1967, after the Wuhan Incident, when Mao agreed to disband the rebel organizations. By doing so, he lost the independent force that had made mass supervision during the early years of the Cultural Revolution more effective than previous efforts. Without independent mass organizations, efforts to institutionalize mass supervision during the late years of the Cultural Revolution were weak and flawed.
What would have happened if in January 1967 Mao had not called on rebels to overthrow the party committees, but instead had encouraged them – more modestly – to seize power in the unions? If the Cultural Revolution had established an enduring space for independent groups to contend for power in local unions, could they have been converted into organizations that were actually capable of carrying out their nominal mandate to make leaders more accountable to their subordinates? We will, of course, never know. But as we sum-up the lessons of the Cultural Revolution, this is a question worth pondering.
http://www.chinastudygroup.org/index.php?action=front2&type=view&id=172
