BobKKKindle$
22nd November 2009, 23:22
What did mass participation in the Cultural Revolution reveal about the political attitudes of the Chinese population?
The years after the end of the Cultural Revolution marked a series of attempts to account for what had taken place in a way that would allow the current government to maintain its legitimacy, whilst also preserving the image of Mao as a well-intentioned leader who, despite having made mistakes after the victory of the CPC in 1949, could still be credited with having created a unified Chinese polity and abolished the injustices of the past. This narrative has developed, beginning with the uncritical acceptance of Mao's policies and the legacy of the Cultural Revolution under Hua Guofeng (otherwise known as the “two whatevers” policy, which called on the Chinese people to “resolutely uphold” Mao's instructions and policy decisions) and culminating in the repudiation of the Cultural Revolution under Deng Xiaoping in 1981, this year marking the publication of a resolution on party history, contending that the Gang of Four were able to take advantage of Mao's mistakes whilst also according Mao his own share of responsibility. Gao contends that, despite having shifted, the contemporary narrative of the Cultural Revolution incorporates a number of persistent themes, and of these the most important is the assumption that the Cultural Revolution was fundamentally about power struggles at the apex of Chinese society and that China's political leaders were able to transform ordinary individuals into unthinking followers, or “fanatic mobs” as Gao puts it, in order to accomplish their factional goals, with political ideology being used, at best, as a means of obscuring the real nature of what was going on. The official historiography has, for Gao, been reinforced through the sponsored publication of “scar literature”, written primarily by individuals of privileged backgrounds, who were overthrown or otherwise persecuted during the course of what is now described by the Chinese state as “ten years of chaos”, this literature often forming the basis of views on the Cultural Revolution outside of China. The problem with a narrative of this kind is not so much that it emphasizes the role of elites, as factional politics were certainly important, but that, like so many other accounts, including those written by sympathizers such as Gao, it is reductive, as it seeks to understand a highly complex event in simple terms. In reality, the Cultural Revolution was many things for many people. This essay will examine the mass aspect of the event and argue that the course of mass participation shows that the Chinese working population was profoundly dissatisfied with the unequal character of Chinese society, and, as a result, took advantage of the Cultural Revolution in order to pursue their own interests and to challenge the political system under which they had been living. This awareness of political and social realities incorporated a capacity on the part of workers to manipulate the discourses of the Maoist state to suit their own ends. The essay will also examine the role of political elites, as these elites were also part of the Chinese population, with their own interests and political attitudes, and in order to understand mass politics as well as the nature of the key social divisions of Chinese society during this period, their role demands examination.
It is useful to begin with an analysis of the role of mass participation in previous political campaigns, as the Cultural Revolution was by no means the first time the Chinese working population had been called upon to carry out a campaign that was initiated by the state. Previous campaigns that also followed this pattern of mobilization include the Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns launched during the early 1950s, these campaigns being designed to expose instances of graft and speculation amongst private capitalists, in addition to other economic crimes, such as stealing economic information, and to extend state ownership to these private businesses, whilst still maintaining the loyalty of entrepreneurs. The mass character of these campaigns is indisputable, as Spence reports that in early February 1952 alone, over 3000 meetings were organized in Shanghai so that workers would be able to report the illegal behaviour of cadres and capitalists, with 160,000 workers attending at least one of these meetings. The same author reports that the central role of ordinary workers had been made possible during the preliminary stage of the campaign in 1951 when cadres had taught organizations how to look into the business affairs of their employers, these cadres numbering 20,000 whilst instruction in the art of investigation was taking place, and during the most intense stage of the movement, there were frequent parades, door-to-door visits by squads of activists, newspaper reading groups, and public speakerphones were used in order to mobilize the entire community and put psychological pressure on individual capitalists. This movement and others like it is highly relevant to the essay not only because it demonstrates the political tactics that were favoured by the CPC, these tactics being expressed ideologically in the form of the mass line, but also because the movement reveals the contradictions inherent in the regime. The government had as its first priority keeping production going and maintaining hierarchy in the workplace, as, according to Harris, when the campaigns resulted in a drop in private production, by possibly a third up to February 1952, the government's response was to reduce the fines imposed on deviant businessmen, and to offer financial help in the form of loans to those who faced difficulties, whilst also telling workers to respect the property rights of those capitalists who were willing to cooperate, including their right to hire and fire within the limits of the law. The same contradiction between participation and control would emerge during the Cultural Revolution. For Walder, a further way in which that event can be seen as a continuation of historic practices both inside and outside China is that it placed persistent emphasis on the theme of socialism being undermined from within the polity itself, as well as by external forces, this theme being tied to the view that those who sought to restore capitalism through conspiracy and cooperation with the imperialist powers, the existence of such conspirators being beyond question, needed to be confronted in order to retain the gains of the revolution. As such, Walder contends that Mao's assertion that his recognition that class struggle continues under socialism represented a major theoretical innovation needs to be questioned, and the theme of conspiracy needs to be at the centre of our understanding. White has also emphasized the role of continuity in shaping the Cultural Revolution, this time focusing on China, by contending that the tactics used by the CPC during previous campaigns were what made violence and factional politics so intense, and in particular he draws attention to the use of political designations such as “bad element” and “rightist” and the way in which these categories had been used since 1949 as a way of constructing group interests and determining access to social goods, with designations of this kind and their practical consequences for families and individuals encouraging either the defence or overthrow of the status quo once the opportunity arose.
The same author has also noted that arrangements in the economic sphere were designed to make individuals in work units dependent on local party bosses so that there were no alternative channels by which individuals could improve their livelihoods, these arrangements resulting in a situation where people's futures were made to depend on their capacity to obey party and government officials. This, along with the political designations noted above, also served to create a basis for factional politics within workplaces, with the allegiances of individuals during these conflicts being determined by whether they had been favoured or discriminated against by local cadres in the past. Walder has also acknowledged that the internal organization of Chinese workplaces could generate conflict, and, as will be shown, it was the past treatment of workers and the varying benefits and rights accorded to the labour force that lay at the heart of mass participation during the Cultural Revolution, hence the necessity of explaining how the working class was structured. White's characterization of worker-party relations is accepted by Walder but the latter also emphasizes that during the course of the late 1950s as well as the early years of the 1960s workplaces had actually become more important, mainly as a result of private property being abolished, with the role of workplaces expanding to encompass the funding of a wide range of benefits, such as apartments, meal halls and medical insurance, and party-state organizations being able to control the access that workers had to these benefits as well as the allocation of raises and promotions. The author goes on to note that party-state organizations deliberately sought to develop political activists who were given preferential access to career opportunities and benefits, including the promise of party membership, in exchange for their loyal support, and that workers could gain the support of factory party and state officials by, for example, working for the factory security departments, which involved observing and reporting on their fellow workers. It was, for Walder, by joining the core of activists in any given enterprise that workers could hope to become group or shift leaders, to be given office jobs in the local union or youth group branches, or in staff offices such as propaganda and security, and whilst these networks cut across occupational groups and could undermine conflict when party officials were able to maintain normalcy and rely on activists, during periods when the power of these officials had broken down, it was easy for struggles to emerge, both within enterprises and across the economy.
This is exactly what happened during the Cultural Revolution, and it is at this point that we can begin to examine the role of mass participation in that event. The first thing that can be said is that, regardless of whether one accepts the argument put forward at the time that Mao's decision to launch the Cultural Revolution was based on a genuine difference of opinion within the party about the direction that the Chinese revolution should take, and the threat of capitalism being restored, from the beginning hierarchical direction was evident, and whilst students and academics such as Nie Yuanzi, who was responsible for the publication of the first dazibao, were called upon to carry out Mao's aims, Mao intended to limit participation to that stratum of Chinese society, at least initially. Indeed, Liu contends that even Nie Yuanzi and six other members of Beijing University's decision to publish their dazibao was effectively the result of them being ordered by Mao and his supporters at the national level to criticize the university party committee, as a way of initiating the Cultural Revolution in the universities and encouraging other students to follow their example in their own institutions. In support of this they point to the fact that, on May 17th, Kang Sheng's wife and multiple members of the Central Cultural Revolution Group had visited Beijing university so as to establish communication with Nie, and that, shortly after the dazibao had appeared a week later, Chen Boda took over the People's Daily and published the dazibao on the front page along with a commentator's article that was loud in its praise, with Mao also having telephoned Kang Sheng from Hangzhou on the previous day to ensure that Nie's dazibao was broadcast on the radio throughout the country. As such, the underlying conflict between mass action and elite direction was present at this point. Of greater interest is the exclusion of workers during the early stages of the movement. Sheehan notes that although workers were mobilized to attend meetings and rallies directed against writers and intellectuals such as Wu Han and Deng Tuo, it was only activists and privileged workers of the kind identified by Walder who were allowed to participate in these events, such that, for most of the workforce, it initially seemed as if the party was carrying out a conventional campaign along the same lines as the anti-rightist campaign of 1957, these campaigns being designed to consolidate the CPC's hold on power, not bring fundamental changes to the balance of political power. It was also these workers who both previously and during the course of the Cultural Revolution were quoted by the party centre to refute the arguments of intellectuals who had allegedly charged that the Great Leap Forward had been a disaster, and that the party had no concern for the interests of working people, with selected workers offering accounts of progress being made in their own enterprises whilst the drive to increase steel production was underway. Sheehan goes on to point out that the mass of ordinary workers were also cautious and showed a lack of interest in the campaign, not only because the movement's relevance to their class interests was not immediately clear as long as it remained focused around cultural and ideological concerns such as whether Wu Han had been offering a tacit defence of Peng Dehuai, but also because those workers who had taken advantage of previous campaigns such as the anti-rightist campaign to express their grievances were aware of the penalties that could and would be imposed by political elites.
Indeed, Mitter has suggested that workers receiving harsher punishments from the state and not being permitted to be political subjects in the same way as students and intellectuals throughout the history of the PRC (and indeed before, especially in the aftermath of the May 4th Movement of 1919) can be understood as the manifestation of a Confucian culture which has historically placed special value on the desirability of academic learning above physical activity. An acceptance of this perspective implies the thesis that the nature of mass participation can only be understood with reference to underlying cultural characteristics, and Mitter also suggests that a cultural explanation enables us to understand the xenophobic elements of the Cultural Revolution, including the burning of the British Embassy in August 1967, and yet, whilst culture may have been important, a closer reading of the statements made by Mao during the course of 1966 reveals the overriding importance of the bureaucracy's class interests, and in practice this meant a desire to continue production. Thus, when Mao's Sixteen Points were published in August 1966, identifying “capitalist roaders in authority in the party” as the key enemy for the first time, and when his own dazibao entitled “Bombard the Headquarters!” appeared during the same month, production was identified as a central concern, with the Cultural Revolution being described as enabling workers to “grasp revolution and promote production” and a project that would serve as “a powerful motive force for the development of the social productive forces”. Although the document identified that Cultural Revolution committees and groups in schools and universities should have “a certain number of representatives of the workers”, and also called for “a system of general elections” for those same bodies, it gave no indication that workers would actually be allowed to participate fully, and, according to MacFarquhar, also stipulated that the Cultural Revolution in the PLA would be carried out in accordance with separate instructions issued by the Military Affairs Commission, and a further central decree issued only a few days after the Sixteen Points decided that in regions along China's borders, the masses would not be permitted to “dismiss officials from office”. In addition to these general constraints, there is also evidence of those workers who did threaten the authorities before the upheavals of late 1966 being severely punished. According to Walder, in addition to being sent to universities at Liu Shaoqi's request, work teams were also sent to factories during the months of July and August in order to look at personnel files and identify those individuals who had bad personal backgrounds or had been the target of political movements in the past, and it was often whilst these individuals were being persecuted due to having bad records that the first mass organizations, centered around those workers who had benefited from the emergence of activist networks during the 1950s, otherwise known as the loyalists, were created. This persecution was also directed against the earliest rebels, as they were called, who, having spoken out during the course of May 1966, found themselves facing house arrest or detention at their work unit, being denounced as “ghosts and monsters” by the work teams, transferred to less desirable jobs and suffering bonus cuts, and, in some rare cases, being subject to struggle sessions and beatings.
These experiences already tell us a great deal about the nature of mass participation and political attitudes, namely that political elites were wary of allowing mass movements to move beyond a narrow set of activities, and that cleavages within the working class were highly significant. The early conflict between rebels and loyalists also existed in the educational system and yet in this case it was based not so much on networks but on the family origin of individual students, as the initial Red Guards were derived mainly from the so-called “five red categories”, meaning students whose parents had belonged to the working class or peasantry prior to 1949 and who, since the CPC's victory, had not come under attack during any of the major political campaigns, with many of these students being the sons and daughters of cadres, who, due to the privileged position they occupied within the political system, had enabled their children to gain access to the foremost educational institutions. The prevalence of educational discrimination was such that, at the Middle School attached to Beijing University, a full 33% of students were from cadre families in 1965, despite cadres only being a tiny proportion of the general population, and Lee reports that these students were leading members of the committees established by the work teams as they withdrew, and that these committees were able to determine who would be able to participate in the Red Guard movement, such that, in many cases, only between fifteen and thirty percent of the student body was initially part of the movement, and, if it was discovered that a participant had an “impure” close relative or if one of their family members had been branded a “bad element”, they were liable to join the ranks of those who had never been allowed to participate in the first place. It was the original Red Guards who, again according to Lee, participated most enthusiastically in the destruction of the “four olds”, whilst also forcing every public building to put up Mao's portrait and writings, requiring libraries to discard books and texts that conflicted with Mao's ideas, calling for all other political parties apart from the CPC to be banned, cutting off long hair in the street (...whilst also shutting down barber shops, according to Liu) and demanding that Song Qingling be removed from her post as vice-chairman of the PRC – in fact, it was precisely because these activities allowed the Red Guards to appear political without having to challenge the power inequalities that allowed them to dominate the movement that they were so prominent, and when these students did challenge individuals, they invariably turned on their teachers as well as the so-called social dregs, specifically the members of the “four black categories”, encompassing the members of former landlord, rich peasant, capitalist and counter-revolutionary families, to the extent that, in Beijing, restaurants and hospitals were forbidden from serving the “class enemy”, and students from these backgrounds who came to the city to make complaints about their local party committees were told that the “red capital” was not the place for “sons of *****es” and were promptly sent home. Thus, White appears correct in saying that mass participation was heavily influenced by the “red” and “black” familial categories.
In this context, students who were targeted and who had demanded the withdrawal of the work teams (primarily due to these teams having handed over their personnel files to the original Red Guards) from the beginning did organize themselves independently of political elites, and were designated radicals, or, in contrast to the Red Guard, the Red Rebels. At this early stage of the movement it was also possible for Mao and other members of the CPC to give them support, with the Cultural Revolution Small Group in particular backing the Third Headquarters after it came into being in September 1966 as an alliance of radical organizations in Beijing, and criticizing Liu for having sent the work teams in against Mao's instructions, despite Mao having earlier shown an ambivalent attitude. This further demonstrates the capacity of the Chinese population for self-mobilization as well as the contradictory role that could be played by the Maoist faction of the party leadership during the period. It was also during this period that a debate over the definition of class emerged, between those who believed that class could be understood primarily in terms of the social origins and political backgrounds of an individual's parents, otherwise known as the proponents of the “blood lineage theory”, and those who placed emphasis on political performance and commitment to Mao's ideas, with these arguments being made possible both by the intuitiveness of those who were involved in the debate and the incoherence of Mao's ideas, this latter factor allowing individuals and groups to manipulate ideological statements and selectively quote Mao's works in order to further their own ends whilst also proclaiming loyalty to Mao. Hinton conveys the intensity of the ideological and physical struggle between rival factions of the student movement by noting that during the course of the “red terror” that was carried out from May 1966 onwards at Tsinghua, squads of students from cadre families searched for anti-Liu dazibao and tore them down if any were found, and anyone who was encountered walking in the road was searched for notes and posters in order to prevent new opinions from being posted up on the walls of the campus, with those who protested or entered into a debate being told that they had “no right to speak” and driven away. However, Liu has shown that, by the end of the year, the Maoist leadership had firmly sided with the radical students, by holding a rally at the Workers Stadium in October at which more than 100,000 of these students and many of their teachers were in attendance, as well as Jiang Qing and Zhou Enlai amongst other high-ranking officials, with students also being authorized to destroy the dossiers that had been complied during the earlier stage of the movement. From this point onwards leaders of the radicals who had been victimized for their opposition to the work teams were rehabilitated and regarded as heroes, as exemplified by Kuai Dafu and Tan Houlan, although the fact that both of these individuals were from privileged backgrounds and had become rebels despite this suggests that the leadership may have found its support for the radicals problematic, and preferred to ignore the family backgrounds of these students in order to avoid having to acknowledge the discrimination that lay at the heart of Chinese society.
The years after the end of the Cultural Revolution marked a series of attempts to account for what had taken place in a way that would allow the current government to maintain its legitimacy, whilst also preserving the image of Mao as a well-intentioned leader who, despite having made mistakes after the victory of the CPC in 1949, could still be credited with having created a unified Chinese polity and abolished the injustices of the past. This narrative has developed, beginning with the uncritical acceptance of Mao's policies and the legacy of the Cultural Revolution under Hua Guofeng (otherwise known as the “two whatevers” policy, which called on the Chinese people to “resolutely uphold” Mao's instructions and policy decisions) and culminating in the repudiation of the Cultural Revolution under Deng Xiaoping in 1981, this year marking the publication of a resolution on party history, contending that the Gang of Four were able to take advantage of Mao's mistakes whilst also according Mao his own share of responsibility. Gao contends that, despite having shifted, the contemporary narrative of the Cultural Revolution incorporates a number of persistent themes, and of these the most important is the assumption that the Cultural Revolution was fundamentally about power struggles at the apex of Chinese society and that China's political leaders were able to transform ordinary individuals into unthinking followers, or “fanatic mobs” as Gao puts it, in order to accomplish their factional goals, with political ideology being used, at best, as a means of obscuring the real nature of what was going on. The official historiography has, for Gao, been reinforced through the sponsored publication of “scar literature”, written primarily by individuals of privileged backgrounds, who were overthrown or otherwise persecuted during the course of what is now described by the Chinese state as “ten years of chaos”, this literature often forming the basis of views on the Cultural Revolution outside of China. The problem with a narrative of this kind is not so much that it emphasizes the role of elites, as factional politics were certainly important, but that, like so many other accounts, including those written by sympathizers such as Gao, it is reductive, as it seeks to understand a highly complex event in simple terms. In reality, the Cultural Revolution was many things for many people. This essay will examine the mass aspect of the event and argue that the course of mass participation shows that the Chinese working population was profoundly dissatisfied with the unequal character of Chinese society, and, as a result, took advantage of the Cultural Revolution in order to pursue their own interests and to challenge the political system under which they had been living. This awareness of political and social realities incorporated a capacity on the part of workers to manipulate the discourses of the Maoist state to suit their own ends. The essay will also examine the role of political elites, as these elites were also part of the Chinese population, with their own interests and political attitudes, and in order to understand mass politics as well as the nature of the key social divisions of Chinese society during this period, their role demands examination.
It is useful to begin with an analysis of the role of mass participation in previous political campaigns, as the Cultural Revolution was by no means the first time the Chinese working population had been called upon to carry out a campaign that was initiated by the state. Previous campaigns that also followed this pattern of mobilization include the Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns launched during the early 1950s, these campaigns being designed to expose instances of graft and speculation amongst private capitalists, in addition to other economic crimes, such as stealing economic information, and to extend state ownership to these private businesses, whilst still maintaining the loyalty of entrepreneurs. The mass character of these campaigns is indisputable, as Spence reports that in early February 1952 alone, over 3000 meetings were organized in Shanghai so that workers would be able to report the illegal behaviour of cadres and capitalists, with 160,000 workers attending at least one of these meetings. The same author reports that the central role of ordinary workers had been made possible during the preliminary stage of the campaign in 1951 when cadres had taught organizations how to look into the business affairs of their employers, these cadres numbering 20,000 whilst instruction in the art of investigation was taking place, and during the most intense stage of the movement, there were frequent parades, door-to-door visits by squads of activists, newspaper reading groups, and public speakerphones were used in order to mobilize the entire community and put psychological pressure on individual capitalists. This movement and others like it is highly relevant to the essay not only because it demonstrates the political tactics that were favoured by the CPC, these tactics being expressed ideologically in the form of the mass line, but also because the movement reveals the contradictions inherent in the regime. The government had as its first priority keeping production going and maintaining hierarchy in the workplace, as, according to Harris, when the campaigns resulted in a drop in private production, by possibly a third up to February 1952, the government's response was to reduce the fines imposed on deviant businessmen, and to offer financial help in the form of loans to those who faced difficulties, whilst also telling workers to respect the property rights of those capitalists who were willing to cooperate, including their right to hire and fire within the limits of the law. The same contradiction between participation and control would emerge during the Cultural Revolution. For Walder, a further way in which that event can be seen as a continuation of historic practices both inside and outside China is that it placed persistent emphasis on the theme of socialism being undermined from within the polity itself, as well as by external forces, this theme being tied to the view that those who sought to restore capitalism through conspiracy and cooperation with the imperialist powers, the existence of such conspirators being beyond question, needed to be confronted in order to retain the gains of the revolution. As such, Walder contends that Mao's assertion that his recognition that class struggle continues under socialism represented a major theoretical innovation needs to be questioned, and the theme of conspiracy needs to be at the centre of our understanding. White has also emphasized the role of continuity in shaping the Cultural Revolution, this time focusing on China, by contending that the tactics used by the CPC during previous campaigns were what made violence and factional politics so intense, and in particular he draws attention to the use of political designations such as “bad element” and “rightist” and the way in which these categories had been used since 1949 as a way of constructing group interests and determining access to social goods, with designations of this kind and their practical consequences for families and individuals encouraging either the defence or overthrow of the status quo once the opportunity arose.
The same author has also noted that arrangements in the economic sphere were designed to make individuals in work units dependent on local party bosses so that there were no alternative channels by which individuals could improve their livelihoods, these arrangements resulting in a situation where people's futures were made to depend on their capacity to obey party and government officials. This, along with the political designations noted above, also served to create a basis for factional politics within workplaces, with the allegiances of individuals during these conflicts being determined by whether they had been favoured or discriminated against by local cadres in the past. Walder has also acknowledged that the internal organization of Chinese workplaces could generate conflict, and, as will be shown, it was the past treatment of workers and the varying benefits and rights accorded to the labour force that lay at the heart of mass participation during the Cultural Revolution, hence the necessity of explaining how the working class was structured. White's characterization of worker-party relations is accepted by Walder but the latter also emphasizes that during the course of the late 1950s as well as the early years of the 1960s workplaces had actually become more important, mainly as a result of private property being abolished, with the role of workplaces expanding to encompass the funding of a wide range of benefits, such as apartments, meal halls and medical insurance, and party-state organizations being able to control the access that workers had to these benefits as well as the allocation of raises and promotions. The author goes on to note that party-state organizations deliberately sought to develop political activists who were given preferential access to career opportunities and benefits, including the promise of party membership, in exchange for their loyal support, and that workers could gain the support of factory party and state officials by, for example, working for the factory security departments, which involved observing and reporting on their fellow workers. It was, for Walder, by joining the core of activists in any given enterprise that workers could hope to become group or shift leaders, to be given office jobs in the local union or youth group branches, or in staff offices such as propaganda and security, and whilst these networks cut across occupational groups and could undermine conflict when party officials were able to maintain normalcy and rely on activists, during periods when the power of these officials had broken down, it was easy for struggles to emerge, both within enterprises and across the economy.
This is exactly what happened during the Cultural Revolution, and it is at this point that we can begin to examine the role of mass participation in that event. The first thing that can be said is that, regardless of whether one accepts the argument put forward at the time that Mao's decision to launch the Cultural Revolution was based on a genuine difference of opinion within the party about the direction that the Chinese revolution should take, and the threat of capitalism being restored, from the beginning hierarchical direction was evident, and whilst students and academics such as Nie Yuanzi, who was responsible for the publication of the first dazibao, were called upon to carry out Mao's aims, Mao intended to limit participation to that stratum of Chinese society, at least initially. Indeed, Liu contends that even Nie Yuanzi and six other members of Beijing University's decision to publish their dazibao was effectively the result of them being ordered by Mao and his supporters at the national level to criticize the university party committee, as a way of initiating the Cultural Revolution in the universities and encouraging other students to follow their example in their own institutions. In support of this they point to the fact that, on May 17th, Kang Sheng's wife and multiple members of the Central Cultural Revolution Group had visited Beijing university so as to establish communication with Nie, and that, shortly after the dazibao had appeared a week later, Chen Boda took over the People's Daily and published the dazibao on the front page along with a commentator's article that was loud in its praise, with Mao also having telephoned Kang Sheng from Hangzhou on the previous day to ensure that Nie's dazibao was broadcast on the radio throughout the country. As such, the underlying conflict between mass action and elite direction was present at this point. Of greater interest is the exclusion of workers during the early stages of the movement. Sheehan notes that although workers were mobilized to attend meetings and rallies directed against writers and intellectuals such as Wu Han and Deng Tuo, it was only activists and privileged workers of the kind identified by Walder who were allowed to participate in these events, such that, for most of the workforce, it initially seemed as if the party was carrying out a conventional campaign along the same lines as the anti-rightist campaign of 1957, these campaigns being designed to consolidate the CPC's hold on power, not bring fundamental changes to the balance of political power. It was also these workers who both previously and during the course of the Cultural Revolution were quoted by the party centre to refute the arguments of intellectuals who had allegedly charged that the Great Leap Forward had been a disaster, and that the party had no concern for the interests of working people, with selected workers offering accounts of progress being made in their own enterprises whilst the drive to increase steel production was underway. Sheehan goes on to point out that the mass of ordinary workers were also cautious and showed a lack of interest in the campaign, not only because the movement's relevance to their class interests was not immediately clear as long as it remained focused around cultural and ideological concerns such as whether Wu Han had been offering a tacit defence of Peng Dehuai, but also because those workers who had taken advantage of previous campaigns such as the anti-rightist campaign to express their grievances were aware of the penalties that could and would be imposed by political elites.
Indeed, Mitter has suggested that workers receiving harsher punishments from the state and not being permitted to be political subjects in the same way as students and intellectuals throughout the history of the PRC (and indeed before, especially in the aftermath of the May 4th Movement of 1919) can be understood as the manifestation of a Confucian culture which has historically placed special value on the desirability of academic learning above physical activity. An acceptance of this perspective implies the thesis that the nature of mass participation can only be understood with reference to underlying cultural characteristics, and Mitter also suggests that a cultural explanation enables us to understand the xenophobic elements of the Cultural Revolution, including the burning of the British Embassy in August 1967, and yet, whilst culture may have been important, a closer reading of the statements made by Mao during the course of 1966 reveals the overriding importance of the bureaucracy's class interests, and in practice this meant a desire to continue production. Thus, when Mao's Sixteen Points were published in August 1966, identifying “capitalist roaders in authority in the party” as the key enemy for the first time, and when his own dazibao entitled “Bombard the Headquarters!” appeared during the same month, production was identified as a central concern, with the Cultural Revolution being described as enabling workers to “grasp revolution and promote production” and a project that would serve as “a powerful motive force for the development of the social productive forces”. Although the document identified that Cultural Revolution committees and groups in schools and universities should have “a certain number of representatives of the workers”, and also called for “a system of general elections” for those same bodies, it gave no indication that workers would actually be allowed to participate fully, and, according to MacFarquhar, also stipulated that the Cultural Revolution in the PLA would be carried out in accordance with separate instructions issued by the Military Affairs Commission, and a further central decree issued only a few days after the Sixteen Points decided that in regions along China's borders, the masses would not be permitted to “dismiss officials from office”. In addition to these general constraints, there is also evidence of those workers who did threaten the authorities before the upheavals of late 1966 being severely punished. According to Walder, in addition to being sent to universities at Liu Shaoqi's request, work teams were also sent to factories during the months of July and August in order to look at personnel files and identify those individuals who had bad personal backgrounds or had been the target of political movements in the past, and it was often whilst these individuals were being persecuted due to having bad records that the first mass organizations, centered around those workers who had benefited from the emergence of activist networks during the 1950s, otherwise known as the loyalists, were created. This persecution was also directed against the earliest rebels, as they were called, who, having spoken out during the course of May 1966, found themselves facing house arrest or detention at their work unit, being denounced as “ghosts and monsters” by the work teams, transferred to less desirable jobs and suffering bonus cuts, and, in some rare cases, being subject to struggle sessions and beatings.
These experiences already tell us a great deal about the nature of mass participation and political attitudes, namely that political elites were wary of allowing mass movements to move beyond a narrow set of activities, and that cleavages within the working class were highly significant. The early conflict between rebels and loyalists also existed in the educational system and yet in this case it was based not so much on networks but on the family origin of individual students, as the initial Red Guards were derived mainly from the so-called “five red categories”, meaning students whose parents had belonged to the working class or peasantry prior to 1949 and who, since the CPC's victory, had not come under attack during any of the major political campaigns, with many of these students being the sons and daughters of cadres, who, due to the privileged position they occupied within the political system, had enabled their children to gain access to the foremost educational institutions. The prevalence of educational discrimination was such that, at the Middle School attached to Beijing University, a full 33% of students were from cadre families in 1965, despite cadres only being a tiny proportion of the general population, and Lee reports that these students were leading members of the committees established by the work teams as they withdrew, and that these committees were able to determine who would be able to participate in the Red Guard movement, such that, in many cases, only between fifteen and thirty percent of the student body was initially part of the movement, and, if it was discovered that a participant had an “impure” close relative or if one of their family members had been branded a “bad element”, they were liable to join the ranks of those who had never been allowed to participate in the first place. It was the original Red Guards who, again according to Lee, participated most enthusiastically in the destruction of the “four olds”, whilst also forcing every public building to put up Mao's portrait and writings, requiring libraries to discard books and texts that conflicted with Mao's ideas, calling for all other political parties apart from the CPC to be banned, cutting off long hair in the street (...whilst also shutting down barber shops, according to Liu) and demanding that Song Qingling be removed from her post as vice-chairman of the PRC – in fact, it was precisely because these activities allowed the Red Guards to appear political without having to challenge the power inequalities that allowed them to dominate the movement that they were so prominent, and when these students did challenge individuals, they invariably turned on their teachers as well as the so-called social dregs, specifically the members of the “four black categories”, encompassing the members of former landlord, rich peasant, capitalist and counter-revolutionary families, to the extent that, in Beijing, restaurants and hospitals were forbidden from serving the “class enemy”, and students from these backgrounds who came to the city to make complaints about their local party committees were told that the “red capital” was not the place for “sons of *****es” and were promptly sent home. Thus, White appears correct in saying that mass participation was heavily influenced by the “red” and “black” familial categories.
In this context, students who were targeted and who had demanded the withdrawal of the work teams (primarily due to these teams having handed over their personnel files to the original Red Guards) from the beginning did organize themselves independently of political elites, and were designated radicals, or, in contrast to the Red Guard, the Red Rebels. At this early stage of the movement it was also possible for Mao and other members of the CPC to give them support, with the Cultural Revolution Small Group in particular backing the Third Headquarters after it came into being in September 1966 as an alliance of radical organizations in Beijing, and criticizing Liu for having sent the work teams in against Mao's instructions, despite Mao having earlier shown an ambivalent attitude. This further demonstrates the capacity of the Chinese population for self-mobilization as well as the contradictory role that could be played by the Maoist faction of the party leadership during the period. It was also during this period that a debate over the definition of class emerged, between those who believed that class could be understood primarily in terms of the social origins and political backgrounds of an individual's parents, otherwise known as the proponents of the “blood lineage theory”, and those who placed emphasis on political performance and commitment to Mao's ideas, with these arguments being made possible both by the intuitiveness of those who were involved in the debate and the incoherence of Mao's ideas, this latter factor allowing individuals and groups to manipulate ideological statements and selectively quote Mao's works in order to further their own ends whilst also proclaiming loyalty to Mao. Hinton conveys the intensity of the ideological and physical struggle between rival factions of the student movement by noting that during the course of the “red terror” that was carried out from May 1966 onwards at Tsinghua, squads of students from cadre families searched for anti-Liu dazibao and tore them down if any were found, and anyone who was encountered walking in the road was searched for notes and posters in order to prevent new opinions from being posted up on the walls of the campus, with those who protested or entered into a debate being told that they had “no right to speak” and driven away. However, Liu has shown that, by the end of the year, the Maoist leadership had firmly sided with the radical students, by holding a rally at the Workers Stadium in October at which more than 100,000 of these students and many of their teachers were in attendance, as well as Jiang Qing and Zhou Enlai amongst other high-ranking officials, with students also being authorized to destroy the dossiers that had been complied during the earlier stage of the movement. From this point onwards leaders of the radicals who had been victimized for their opposition to the work teams were rehabilitated and regarded as heroes, as exemplified by Kuai Dafu and Tan Houlan, although the fact that both of these individuals were from privileged backgrounds and had become rebels despite this suggests that the leadership may have found its support for the radicals problematic, and preferred to ignore the family backgrounds of these students in order to avoid having to acknowledge the discrimination that lay at the heart of Chinese society.