This is the first on two articles assessing classes and class struggle in China's past and present day. The second, an exchange with Yi Ching Wu by David Schweickart, will appear tomorrow. Yesterday's Class Enemy: Class Ideology and the Politics of the Cultural Revolution By Yi Ching Wu University of Chicago It is not so much of an exaggeration to say that the Cultural Revolution was all about class-it was, in any case, officially self-defined as “a great revolution in which one class overthrows another.” The notion of class framed the experiences and practices of hundreds of millions of Chinese people. Class and class struggle constituted the very political framework of the movement, and defined its main objectives. A highly elaborate vocabulary of class pervaded the everyday life of the entire Chinese population. But what did it really mean to talk about “class” during the Cultural Revolution? What was the meaning of “class struggle,” and who were its primary targets? These apparently innocuous questions have no self-evident answers. In the contemporary Chinese context, the meanings of such political terms as “class,” “class struggle,” and “revolution” have been largely evacuated. They belong to this class of words which, by virtue of having been used so much and so often, have come to mean almost completely nothing at all. Yet these are by no means trivial questions. My purpose of probing the meaning and character of class politics during the Cultural Revolution is to explore two broad questions with regard to the internal complexity as well as the historical significance of the Cultural Revolution. First, in what sense was the Cultural Revolution cultural? And second, to what extent was it revolutionary? It is indeed quite true on the eve of the Cultural Revolution Mao was increasingly concerned with the problem of a new ruling elite in the Communist Party, which he in part condemned as a functional bourgeoisie. Richard Kraus wrote that during the last decades of Mao's era there grew an orientation toward class which traced the roots of social conflict more deeply into the institutions of socialist society: “In this view, socialist classes were based ultimately upon power relationships in a highly bureaucratized society. The central institution in the shaping of new class relationships was the state.” A number of Western interpreters of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, with Kraus included, have argued that a specifically Chinese version of what may be called a “new class” critique of socialism had been developed in late Maoism, and was practiced in the Cultural Revolution. In any case, wasn't it Mao who argued that a new privileged class was gaining power at the very heart of the Party? And, wasn't it true that the main target of the Cultural Revolution was the “power-holders within the Party taking the capitalist road?” Maurice Meisner, for example, wrote in the most characteristic fashion: 'The ideology of the Cultural Revolution set forth the thesis that China's postrevolutionary order had created a new bureaucratic ruling class, a functional “bourgeoisie” that was exploiting the masses of workers and peasants by virtue of its political power. … [Mao] attributed the origins of this new “bourgeoisie” to the inequalities generated by Communist China's political system, a Stalinist hierarchy of bureaucratic ranks and status. … In conceiving the Cultural Revolution, Mao had arrived at a conclusion that no other Communist in power had been willing to entertain. Mao came to believe that a socialist society, if left to its own device, would generate a new exploiting class. The new ruling class would be fashioned not from the remnants of the old bourgeoisie that had been destroyed by the revolution but rather from the bureaucrats of the Communist present … who now appropriated an increasing share of what the laboring masses produced. Mao sometimes bluntly referred to them as “the bureaucratic class,” whose members, he charged, were becoming 'bourgeois elements sucking the blood of the workers.'' Meisner located Mao's critique in the direct pedigree of Trotsky and Djilas, complaining that while most Western observers hailed Djilas as insightful and courageous, “Mao's ideas were widely dismissed as the paranoiac ravings of a fanatic ideologue:” Mao Zedong was not the first to recognize that a socialist revolution could produce a new exploiting class of bureaucratic rulers. He was preceded by Max Weber, Leon Trotsky, and Milovan Djilas, among a good many others. What was unique about Mao's notion of a new bureaucratic ruling class was not his analysis of the phenomenon … but rather the fact that the idea was put forth by the leader of a Communist state. It had not happened before, and it is not likely to happen again. From Mao's perspective, China's bureaucrats had a vested interest not in private property but rather in “public ownership” by a state that they controlled, and from which they derived social and economic benefits for themselves and their families. They owed their status and privileges, however paltry in most cases, not to ownership of property but rather to their status as the de facto “owners of the conditions of production.” In Mao's eyes, they were, or at least were becoming, a propertyless but functional bourgeoisie. Whether one may be able to conclude that a distinctively Maoist version of a “new class theory” had existed, and with what degree of coherence, might indeed be a contentious issue. But suffice it to say that an affirmative answer must at least be qualified by several caveats. First of all, despite its stress on the role of bureaucratic power, the Maoist revival of class from the early 1960s focused for the most part more on the distributive correlates of power-such as bureaucratic privileges and wage-grade system-rather than upon the very structure and institutions of state power itself. Secondly, such Cultural-Revolutionary era class labels as “new bourgeois elements,” “capitalist power-holders,” etc. referred for the most part to the existence of individuals and factions that allegedly existed inside the Communist Party, who were corrupted by ideas of the bourgeois class. The party-state apparatus per se and the political power it monopolized was not viewed as the source of problems. This point was made abundantly clear in an important Party document issued in the height of the Cultural Revolution, in February 1967: We must make a class analysis of everything in society. As a matter of course, we must also make a class analysis of the people in authority. A clear distinction must be drawn between the persons in authority belonging to the proletariat and the persons in authority taking the capitalist road. All revolutionary people must resolutely overthrow the handful of persons in authority taking the capitalist road, but firmly support the persons in authority who belong to the proletariat. In this view, the growth of deviant figures and tendencies is not endogenous to the Party itself and has nothing intrinsically to do with the bureaucracy; rather, they often originate from the surviving elements and forces of the old exploiting classes. Thirdly, the object of “class struggle” during the Cultural Revolution was usually viewed to consist of ideologically deviant individuals among the leadership. The idea of the structural position of the new ruling class was never clearly articulated. Despite its extremely bleak view of the Thermidorian forces inside the Party, the Cultural Revolution doctrine of class in fact had a rather sanguine estimate regarding such deviancy. According to this view, except for a very small minority of die-hard “capitalist roaders”, the majority of the deviant cadres must be viewed as “rectifiable.” In fact, when radical rebels began to question the officially sanctioned doctrine by drawing the inferences that 95% of all cadres should be struck down and the structural basis of the Party-state itself must be challenged, the Maoist leadership intervened energetically to affirm that most cadres were actually either “good” or “comparative good.” “To refuse to make a class analysis of the persons in authority,” as the same Party document declared, “and instead to suspect, negate, exclude and overthrow them all indiscriminately is an anarchist trend of thought.” Fourthly, while Mao had indeed harshly criticized the bureaucratism of the “new bourgeois elements” in the Party, his record on this issue remains at best ambiguous. For example, Mao had made explicit remarks to the effect that they should be referred to as “elements” or “cliques,” not as “strata,” and much less as a class. In one of his most famous passages, one frequently cited in support of a “new-class” interpretation, Mao was quoted to have said in 1965: “The bureaucratic class is sharply opposed to the working class and the poor and lower-middle peasants. These people have become or are in the process of becoming bourgeois elements sucking the blood of the workers.” But these words of Mao need to be interpreted more carefully, not to mention that certain key phrases might have been improperly translated. Mao made these remarks on a report submitted by Chen Zhengren, then the Minister of Agricultural Machinery: ' I am in much agreement with this view, that the class of cadres infected with “bureaucratic air” (guanliao zhuyizhe jieji) is acutely antagonistic to the working class and the poor and lower-middle peasants. If the managerial staff do not go to the shop-floor to work on the “three togethers” (san tong), if they do not look for teachers from whom they may learn one or two crafts, then they will remain in a state of acute class conflict with the working class. In the end, they will be knocked down just like capitalists by the workers. They cannot manage well, if they do not learn and remain ignorant of any productive skill. It is impossible to make other people understand, if they themselves are confused. Such people are already or are on the way to become bourgeois elements (zichan jieji fenzi) sucking the blood of the workers. How can they have sufficient understanding? They are the objects of struggle and revolution. … We can only rely on those cadres who are not hostile to the workers, and are imbued with revolutionary spirit. Obviously, to translate the term guanliao zhuyizhe jieji as “bureaucratic class” is grossly inaccurate. It injects a far more clear-cut political meaning into the Maoist theory of class than what is actually available. Rather than referring to a structurally defined notion of class centering on the control of political power and means of production, and referring to the bureaucracy as forming (at least potentially) a “new class,” Mao's use of the term meant instead those cadres who were ideologically vulnerable. That the focal point was only a certain segment of the bureaucracy is most convincingly demonstrated by Mao's insistence that the rest-“those cadres who are not hostile to the workers, and are imbued with revolutionary spirit”-are politically reliable. Over a year later, this point received its strongest expression in the Sixteen Articles, which included the “revolutionary cadres” as the “main force (zhuli jun) of the Cultural Revolution.” Clearly, what is central for the Maoist discourse was not about the fundamental transformation of sociopolitical relationships and abolition of the bureaucracy, but rather, it is about producing a ruling apparatus that is less rigid and more responsive to mass input. Within this formula, in short, it is only the form of class rule-rather than class rule per se that is under attack. It is well known that the Maoist revival of class, which focused increasingly the on the Party and state cadres, began in the late 1950s. After the Lushan Plenum, as Kraus carefully documented, harsh criticism of cadre performance was a frequent theme in Mao's thought-“antibureaucratic sentiments assumed a new significance, as Mao began cautiously to move from an organizational critique to a class analysis of China's cadres.” The key issue here, I shall argue however, is not just that whether the cadres were in incorporated in a class analysis, but also in what kind of class analysis. Kraus distinguished two fundamentally different approaches to the problem of bureaucracy in a post-revolutionary society, and according to him, “Mao entertained both of them.” The easier course was to “distinguish proper from unacceptable bureaucratic behavior, attributing the former to proletarian consciousness and the latter to persisting bourgeois influence.” A second, much more subversive approach stressed that bureaucrats themselves as a class. “In this perspective, the issue is not simply ideological reform, but structural reform of the institutions created since socialist transformation.” I would like to advance Kraus' argument a bit further. Instead of postulating a difference between what Kraus called the “politics of ideology (or behavior)” and the “politics of institution”, I believe that a sharper distinction may be made between what may be tentatively called the “politics of old class” and the “politics of new class.” This distinction is self-evident: while the former emphasizes the former exploiting classes as the main focus of class struggle, the latter stress the formation of the new ruling class-with its structural base in the control of state power and social means of production-in the post-revolutionary society. Obviously, what Kraus called the “politics of institution” corresponds to what I call the “politics of new class,” and his “politics of behavior” is in fact a special variant of the “old class politics.” As the events of the Cultural Revolution demonstrate, there were ample cases of “old class politics” that focused on neither ideology nor behavior, but rather on the physical persons of alleged old-class enemies. I argue that reframing Kraus' thesis in terms of “old” and “new class” politics is more than merely a terminological matter, as it will help us better understand the political dynamic of the Cultural Revolution as well as its historical limitations. What is at stake is the specific focus of class analysis of post-revolutionary China: How are classes to be divided? Are the class lines to replicate the social divisions produced by the extinct system of private property, or are they to follow the newer distinctions emerging in a bureaucratized post-revolutionary society? And, what is the meaning of class struggle? Here it suffices to note that Mao's view, at least prior to the Cultural Revolution, was a fairly clear one. “With few exceptions,” Kraus wrote, “he emphasized the behavioral dimension of class as he tried to make a new class analysis, consistently holding back from a full-fledged examination of the structural roots of inequality in socialist society.” Kraus tried hard to explain Mao's lack of theoretical clarity. It is likely, suggested Kraus, that Mao's hesitation grew from “a realization that a more structurally oriented analysis of class might locate all cadres within a single hostile category:” Not only was Mao uneager to identify himself and his followers as the class enemy, but his tactical sense was too shrewd to permit the political suicide which that manner of class analysis could well entail. Kraus further speculated that Mao's hesitation “may have included an element of guile, as he sought to soften the break he was making in the Marxist-Leninist tradition.” But the key question here is: was there really a break, even if only a “soft” one? And, if indeed there was some sort of break, how effective was it? I argue that while Maoism did find the “new bourgeois elements” within the Party and in some way challenged the legitimacy of the Party apparatus, it nevertheless attempted to locate their roots in the former dominant classes. Indeed, the ideology and practice of class which prevailed in China before the Cultural Revolution was one which emphasized the role of the overthrown exploiting classes. The idea of the Cultural Revolution as it is understood today emerged when it became obvious to a small segment of the CCP leadership that the transformation of the ownership system and development of the forces of production was not sufficient to guarantee the transition to socialism. Evidently, late Maoism produced a highly dynamic view of class processes in a post-revolutionary society, integrating the reciprocal interactions among ideological, social, and political levels in a single analytical framework. For Mao, powerful tendencies toward the restoration of capitalism exist in a postrevolutionary society-which, if left unchecked, could continue to threaten the victory of the revolution itself. Mao was convinced that after the exploitative class relations based on private ownership were abolished, class struggle intensify rather than diminish, and shifted to new terrains, i.e. to the spheres of culture, ideology, and politics. The degeneration of socialism does not necessarily occur through the violent overthrow of the new state by its former enemies, as Mao concluded on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, but rather more likely through “peaceful evolution” under the corrosive influences of the overthrown classes. In fact, this view was already foreshadowed in Mao's famous speech to the CCP Central Committee in March 1949, in a passage that was frequently quoted during the Cultural Revolution: It has been proven that the enemy cannot conquer us by force of arms. However, the flattery of the bourgeoisie may conquer the weak-willed in our ranks. There may be some communists, who were not conquered by enemies with guns and were worthy of the name of heroes for standing up to these enemies, but who cannot withstand sugar-coated bullets; they will be defeated by sugar-coated bullets. Very briefly, this theory of “capitalist restoration,” which formed the central justification of the Cultural Revolution, mainly consists of four interrelated components: (1) The overthrown exploiting classes always attempt to recover the “paradise” that they have been deprived of. (2) New elements of capitalism are constantly and spontaneously generated among the petty-bourgeois strata, in particular among the small peasantry. (3) Political degenerates and new bourgeois elements may emerge in the revolutionary ranks, as a result of bourgeois influence and the pervasive, corrupting atmosphere of the petty bourgeoisie. The greatest danger is to come from within, and especially from the above-the leading cadres. (4) The external circumstances for the domestic continuance of class struggle are the encirclement by international capitalism and imperialism, and their subversive activities to accomplish peaceful disintegration. It was in 1962 that Mao, for the first time, placed the class issue directly on the Party's agenda. The basic frame of reference of this emerging political doctrine, however, focused primarily on the role of the former exploiting classes. Mao's speech at the Beidaihe Conference reiterated the political and ideological influences of the old exploiting classes: “[In our socialist society] bourgeois ideas shall always exist, for decades if not for hundreds of years. … The history of socialism is fairly short, only less than several decades-how could we have cleaned them all?” For Mao, the record of the Chinese revolution in this regard had been mixed: Our revolution is perhaps the most thorough and complete. Yet in some places a significant number of bad people or counterrevolutionary elements have sneaked (hunru) into the government or leadership. The transformation of the ownership of the means of production does not mean that we have solved the problem of ideology. Socialist transformation has destroyed the ownership system of the exploiting classes, yet that doesn't mean that the struggle on political and ideological fronts has also ceased. [Bourgeois] influences in the sphere of ideology will continue for a very long time to come. … The bourgeoisie can be generated anew (xinsheng). That is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union. Mao's reference to the “new bourgeoisie” is highly significant-this was probably one of the earliest usages of a term that was to become politically explosive a few years later. But what is really significant is not Mao's emphasis on the “new bourgeoisie” and its continuous regeneration, but rather the way its political content and social origin was conceptualized. Clearly, for Mao many of the so-called “new bourgeois elements” were simply members of the old exploiting classes to begin with, whether literally speaking or defined in ideological terms. The crucial distinction between the “new” and “old” classes therefore almost completely faded away, as Mao continued in the same speech: Among our party members there are many petit bourgeoisie, some rich peasants and their descendents, some intellectuals, and some bad people they have not yet been remolded and are not at all Communists. These people are only Communist Party members in appearance; but they are actually Guomindang. “The remnants of the bourgeoisie are the domestic origin of revisionism,” concluded Mao, “and its international origin is the imperialist oppression.” These themes were reemerged at the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Party Central Committee in September, 1962. In his famous opening speech, Mao posed the question that had become increasingly familiar in the Chinese media: “Are there still classes in the socialist countries? Does class struggle still exist?” His answer was unambiguous: It can now be affirmed that classes do exist in socialist countries, and that class struggle definitely exists here. After the victory of the revolution, because of the existence of the bourgeoisie internationally, because of the existence of bourgeois remnants internally, because the petit bourgeoisie exists and continually generates a bourgeoisie, therefore the classes which have been overthrown within the country will continue to exist for a long time to come and may even attempt restoration. Raising the famous slogan “Never Forget Class Struggle,” the Tenth Plenum was a historic occasion, which laid out for the first time the basic theoretical framework of the Cultural Revolution, a doctrine that was to receive further elaboration in the year-long Sino-Soviet polemic in 1963-64.. If the Maoist discourse of class is inherently limited in its political clarity and boldness, there may be another level of factors that further limited its critical potentials. The increasing emphasis in late-Maoist discourse that the bourgeoisie could be “born anew” in socialist societies, and particularly from within their governing apparatuses, needs to be situated in the crucial historical context of the existence of what may be called a “class status system”-a gigantic institutionalized apparatus to classify and assign the “class nature” (jieji chengfen) of every member of the Chinese population. This system of exclusion and victimization, which we may figuratively call China's “Great Classification,” is of enormous importance. Its policing function was of course significant, but that does not capture its full complexity. For the purpose of this essay, I would focus on the ideological and political effects of the class-status system as reification. Most of this story are quite familiar. After 1949, all families were assigned a designation based on the status of the family head, according to the Party's taxonomy of class. The system of family origin originated as an revolutionary instrument during the late 1940s. After the Communist victory in 1949, the practice of class designation, which in earlier years was enacted as a practical task necessary in highly concrete processes of revolutionary struggle, was now transported into the post-revolutionary social order, and universalized into a general administrative system of identifying, classifying, and policing social identities and positions. It was really through such system of Great Classification, in which each person could be located in an appropriate slot, that the concept of “class” acquired a special concreteness in post-1949 China. Building upon earlier policies, the Communist Party developed a highly complex system of class statuses, with over sixty designations. While the basic scheme of class had been largely established by the early 1950s, new categories were constantly added whenever necessary, during numerous political campaigns until the 1970s. Class labels could be applied, and violent “class struggle” conducted, for all sorts of conceivable transgressions. Many were made class enemies because of reasons other than those of class: conversion to foreign religion, common crimes, or simply bad behavior, and many others suffered merely because they were unfavored by leaders or were just unlucky enough. Such processes often obscured rather than illuminated actual class positions and relations. During the first three decades of the PRC, these designations-accompanied and reinforced by various institutional and ritual forms of “class struggle”-provided the material basis for cognitive consensus both within the Party and the general populace about the political meaning of class. The issue of class meant a person's family background and his/her own individual class status that was derived from it, a person's class status or background was a matter of record-the officially determined class designation. Although theoretically speaking class labels were not supposed to be inherited beyond two generations, “class origin” as defined by family connection or bloodline were in actuality inherited patrilineally, and inherited class status remained the main determinant of an individual's socioeconomic position. Indeed, Chinese society on the eve of the Cultural Revolution had numerous social outcasts. Although Mao insisted that class enemies made up no more than 5 percent of the total population, the actual proportion was much higher. The point is that if one person was labeled as a member of the enemy class, not only his or her immediate family but also relatives could be stigmatized. If those people were to be included, the total number of people directly affected could exceed 15 to 20 percent of the entire population. The stigma of undesirable class origins or dubious political pasts was indelible, virtually impossible to be cast off either by statements of loyalty or repudiation of one's class or parents. Reaching the climax in 1964-1965, a whole network of class-discriminatory institutions and practices aiming at hampering the life-chances of those social aliens were systematically put in place in all aspects important for everyday life-education, housing, justice, food rations, employment, and so on. Determining the status of different groups of citizens, such a classificatory system of “class” functioned like a de facto estate system, where socioeconomic rights depended on how one was legally classified. In the Chinese context, until the late 1970s when this system was finally dismantled, the reification of class can be best illustrated by the fact that one's “class” position was even entered into the identification card-the ubiquitous household registration book-as well as one's secret dossier, side by side with information on such categories as age, nationality, birthplace, and sex. Such tendencies to treat class as static layers in a hierarchical structure, according to quantifiable “economic” criteria such as past property ownership, or specifiable “political” criteria like past political connections, ideological stance, etc., contrast sharply with a socio-historical conception of class that focuses on the structurally determined relations between appropriators and producers, and the contradictions which account for social and historical processes. “The finest-meshed sociological net,” as E. P. Thompson wrote, “cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give one of deference or love.” In China, such halting of the fluency of class history resulted in the fossilization of class. Class analysis, once a powerful instrument of revolutionary practice, produced ossified classificatory schemes and specimens which, essentially frozen in time, bore little if any relationship with actual class contradictions. The hegemonic discourse of class struggle, which culminated in explosive fashion during the Cultural Revolution, was thus built on increasingly widening gap between political representation and social reality. There was simply no identifiable material basis for the class existence of feudal landlords or capitalists in any serious sense of the term. Within this system, the remnants of old class enemies were reduced by various political campaigns to totally powerless and pathetic figures. But this did not really matter-what mattered was that their repeated scapegoating, however artificially staged, gave real, recognizable human faces to a abstract discourse based more on imagination than on social reality. The political import of such a spectral, fossilized stratificational system cannot be overemphasized, in spite of its obvious theoretical impoverishment. Speaking on the meaning of the “new class” in late Maoism, which had become one of the focal issues of the Cultural Revolution, Stuart Schram remarked: Whatever our conclusion regarding the nature of the 'new class' and its place in Mao's scheme of things, the “class status” of the overwhelming majority of the citizens of the Chinese People's Republic would necessarily continue to be determined by their family origins, and/or by their subjective attitudes. Beyond any doubt, Mao was fully responsible for the use of inherited class status, or chengfen, as the basis for something not far short of a caste system, governing the lives and prospects of all Chinese citizens. Schram is certainly correct on this. But his argument may be pushed a step further. The crucial issue here, it seems, is not merely that how the two schemes of classification-based upon “old” and “new” criteria-were juxtaposed to one another, but rather, how they may have interacted or interpenetrated within a common political framework. The key point here is that it was really from the imaginary universe of the “old classes” that the Maoist problematic of the “new class” evolved, and under which it was likewise subsumed. In this rather congested symbolic space, the fine yet crucial points of political distinction in the analysis of classes and social production relations were easily lost. All social aliens-real or imagined-were lumped together into the single category of class enemies, ultimately standing for all that was evil in the old society. Within such a discourse, which in part obeys what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe called the “logic of equivalence,” the list of “class enemies” as such could grow endlessly, by simple extension and incorporation. The equivalential chain of class enemies could theoretically expand forever, with each newly incorporated element partaking the same symbolic essence or class identity as reflecting the evils of the old society. The nomination of “Party persons in authority taking the capitalist road” as the chief target of the Cultural Revolution reflected precisely such a view, which posits a unmediated connection between class enemies “from below” and “from above,” or between the “old” and “new”classes-a link that would typify the politics and ideology of class during the Cultural Revolution. The chief justification of “continuing the class struggle” was that historically designated class enemies-bourgeoisie, landlords, KMT functionaries, American spies, etc.-had “stolen or wormed into the Communist Party.” The so-called “capitalist roaders” not only represented the interests of bourgeoisie and landlords, but were hidden counter-revolutionaries to begin with. Liu Shaoqi, for example, was officially accused of not only being a “capitalist power-holder,” but also a national traitor and a secret KMT agent. The revisionist deviation was therefore not one that grew organically within the Party, but rather was an alien intrusion. The struggle between the “two lines” could now be reduced to a struggle between proletarian revolutionaries and enemy agents who had infiltrated the revolutionary ranks from without. The subsumption of the “new class” under the far more elaborately-and rigidly-developed formation of the “old classes” was to have far-reaching consequences with regard to the direction of the Cultural Revolution and the ways in which the movement was to be understood by the Chinese populace. The mass phase of the Cultural Revolution began in August 1966 with the inherently ambiguous call from the Maoist leadership “to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic authorities and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes.” “Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown,” as the Sixteen Articles stated, “it is still trying to use the old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavour to stage a restoration.” The campaign very quickly developed into an all-out, violent assault by the Red Guards from “good” class backgrounds against cultural relics, the “four olds,” “bourgeois academic authorities,” relatively well-to-do urban middle class, and remnant bourgeoisie-all defenseless against political attack-in what was then known as the “Red Terror.” While the task of cleansing the Party and eliminating bourgeois influences in society as a whole did escalate the movement into the rebels' attack against the Party and government officials and offices, as manifesting in numerous “power seizures,” the absence of clearly defined objectives and targets of political struggle inevitably resulted in the degeneration of mass movement into pervasive factional conflicts throughout 1967 and 1968. Political consolidation and demobilization was achieved by deploying the army-the most bureaucratic agency of the state apparatus, as well as by purging the unruly elements from the mass rebel organizations. The last great official campaign of the Cultural Revolution, and the prelude to the full restoration of the Communist Party, was the movement to “purify class ranks” in 1968-69, which investigated “class” identities, histories, and networks of tens of thousands of individuals, with “undesirable” ones denounced and persecuted. That the Cultural Revolution began with a call (albeit ambiguous) to attack the Party bureaucrats yet ended with a political campaign that emphasized social class origins and old-class labels marked a significant retreat on the question of defining class in China's postrevolutionary society, and was a profound historical irony as well. Indeed, the ubiquitous slogan “never forget class struggle” evoked a ready-made vocabulary of political representation, a dogmatically imposed interpretive framework deeply rooted in institutionalized social practices that touched upon the everyday life of the entire Chinese population. While the vast majority of former bourgeoisie, landlords and their families existed as “classes” only as sociological fossil in the imaginary universe of classes and class struggle, this did not make the system any less powerful or real in its politico-ideological effect-the tens of millions of people branded with pejorative class labels and deprived of citizenship rights produced the only available empirical “handle” for the popular political understanding of class, and for any call from Mao for renewed class struggle. During the Cultural Revolution, the politics of challenging the “new bureaucratic ruling class” was hence easily displaced and obscured by its “old class” counterpart. Potentially more subversive conceptions were easily appropriated and transformed into more conservative purposes. In the reality of this volatile situation, the point is not just that how much the subversive politics of the “new class” may have been constrained by the existing “old class” discourse. In fact, it would be fair to argue that the politics of the “old class” was probably the only politics available-i.e., it was the only effective form of politics with a tangible social referent and emotional valence. Instead of giving rise to the formation of a more adequate conception of class relations and struggle in post-revolutionary China, the juxtaposition and compression of both the “new class” and “old class” discourses within a frozen political framework had therefore created a rather hopelessly incoherent politico-ideological space with a extremely unstable dynamic, in which the “new” and “old” tactics of class analysis were to mingle, interpenetrate, and even fuse, whereby the former could be easily assimilable into the reified categories of the latter and became frequently indistinguishable. Despite their intrinsic incompatibility, they were confused together into an incoherent hodgepodge which became the dominant political rhetoric of the movement. The Cultural Revolution reached one new height after another in such reciprocally conditioned symbolic transformations of the old and new classes, and in perceptions of the pervasive evils of remnant forces and their numerous contemporary agents. The political significance of such an equivalential relationship between the new and old class enemies, however, was rather contradictory. On the one hand, it made it possible to think of the struggle against the powerless old class remnants as acts of major political significance, and on the other, to think of rebellion against the Party authority as class struggle. By natural extension, we may further postulate that the Maoist doctrine of class could be subject to interpretations of quite different kind, with radically different political implications and mobilizational effects. This led to sharply opposing notions of what the continuation of revolution might mean, what the danger of capitalist restoration was and how it might occur, who should be the major targets of struggle, etc. Above all, the employment of different politico-theoretical perspectives was intimately linked to sharply divergent views of the nature as well as the direction of the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution began in 1966 for the most part as a “revolution from above” which, while required much mass mobilization, was much dependent upon highly centralized political direction. Most of the rebels did not actually rise of their own volition, although many might have long been discontented with the established system. More than a decade and half after the victory of the revolution, popular resentment against bureaucratic privilege and abuses was widespread, and many citizens were only too eager to take full advantage of the newly proclaimed “right to rebel” against established authority. However, as social dissatisfaction failed to find effective political expressions, popular protests lacked a clear ideological focus, and a coherent direction as well. Discontent degenerated. Manifesting frequently as factional fighting, rioting, senseless killing, and other forms of blind violence, mass social discontent lacked an articulate theoretical consciousness and a sense of an overall political purpose. But this situation was to change soon. Though set in motion from the above, the mass movement began to take on a life on its own. While all the actors were constrained by the official doctrines, these were often extremely ambiguous and their meaning sharply contested. The rebel political forces released by Mao's call to rebel broadened the struggles considerably, and often based on distinct and contradictory interpretations of the goals of the movement, inevitably challenging the boundaries set by the Maoist leadership. The more radical political possibilities of the Cultural Revolution, I should briefly note, were pressed further and explored by many young grassroots rebel activists and critics. Audaciously challenging the Cultural Revolution's inherent contradiction, these activists questioned the discrepancy between its radical-revolutionary rhetoric and its essentially reformist proclivity for attacking the individual power-holders and remnant classes, instead of searching for the class-structural roots of China's social and political problems. Their radically anti-hierarchical impulses were often accompanied by a deep concern that a new bureaucratic class could rise to dominate society, and a more articulate understanding with regard to the nature and organization of class power in the post-revolutionary state. Beginning to step outside the prevailing ideological paradigm of the Cultural Revolution, they demanded a new analysis of the class relations in China's post-revolutionary society, arguing that the major conflict was not between the proletariat and the formerly propertied classes, nor between Mao's supporters and the “capitalist roaders,” but between a “red capitalist class” and the masses of the Chinese working people. As Whither China, the famous Shengwulian manifesto wrote: At present over 90 per cent of our high-ranking officials have formed into a unique class-the red capitalist class ….. [The] class of red capitalists had entirely become a decaying class that hindered the progress of history. The relations between them and the people in general had changed from relations between leaders and the led, to those between rulers and the ruled and between exploiters and the exploited. From the relations of revolutionaries of equal standing, it had become the relationship between oppressors and the oppressed. The class interests, special prerogatives, and high salaries of the class of red capitalists were built upon the foundation of oppression and exploitation of the broad masses of the people. For these “ultraleft” critics, the main political challenge facing the Cultural Revolution was no longer about dragging out some “capitalist roaders” or “new bourgeois elements” within the Party, but rather the overthrow of the ruling class with its collective control of economic and political power. In their views, the alienated Party bureaucracy was not to be reformed or rectified from within-in whatever violent or spectacular fashion, but was to be overthrown by mass revolutionary movement from below. Operating with an analysis that saw class struggle as a function of the character of the existing system itself rather than of vestigial influences from overthrown classes, these young activists often invoked the Paris Commune as the historical example of creating new institutional forms for realizing and safeguarding popular power. The Cultural Revolution was therefore not to be understood as “a purely cultural revolution”, but rather “a revolution in which one class overthrows another.” Indeed, it may not be too much exaggeration to say that a more developed class consciousness was in the making. Indeed, during the later months of the Cultural Revolution, there had been some unmistakable signs of a highly significant cleavage that was in the making: an alternative political logic-and a truly subversive ideological trend-began to emerge and became tentatively operative. Spread hand-to-hand by various rebel groups, and further disseminated by being labeled by the Beijing leadership as “poisonous material to be criticized,” writings of some of these critics reached a national readership of hundreds of thousands. A more radical understanding of class began to diverge from the dogmatic straitjacket of the prevalent discourse of the Cultural Revolution. The significance of such tendencies cannot be overemphasized. Constituted a line of development toward what Gramsci called the “integral autonomy” of the subalterns, they formed a crucial stage in the development of a critically grounded class consciousness on the part of China's subordinated social groups in opposition to the emerging new ruling class. But such moment of rupture from below failed to fully materialize during the Cultural Revolution. Swiftly crushed, they were denounced for deliberately propagating a false image of a self-perpetrating bureaucratic class, and as “anarchism,” “absolute egalitarianism,” “ultra-democratic,” “anti-Party,” or simply as “counter-revolutionary.” Their theoretical and political activities were without exception suppressed ruthlessly, very often under direct instructions from the Cultural Revolution leadership, and virtually all of them vanished in the purges of the “extreme left” that began as early as in 1967. And by late 1969, the upsurge of mass movement in China was largely dissolved, through either political incorporation, mass demobilization, or simply violent repression. It was indeed the 1967-68 rupture from below which put Maoism's much-acclaimed espousal of “uninterrupted revolution” to the definitive test. Cannibalizing its own rebellious children, Maoism quickly exhausted its political energy, and was in the end unable to transcend its historical limits by transforming state power. In the juxtaposition and confusion of very different targets of class struggle, the distinctive identity of the new ruling class and its structural roots were much diluted and obscured. It is in this crucial respect that the Cultural Revolution was seriously flawed, and the various political practices associated with it were in the end ineffectual. Above all, the Cultural Revolution and its prevailing discourse of class lacked a very clear focus as defined in structural terms. Its politics of class was simultaneously too broad and too narrow. From the very beginning, the movement failed to define clearly its primary objectives and targets-questions that were to become the main source of conflicts for its entire duration. Partially as a result of this confusion, the political targets during the Cultural Revolution were often too diffuse-during the most iconoclastic days of the Cultural Revolution, the mass movement mobilized in the name of “class struggle” attacked against everything and anything. Pushed to its radical extreme, the concept of “class” melted down under its own unbearable weight of being licensed to target and attack everything, eventually and inevitably shattering itself. Once a rigorous category denoting structural relationships characteristic of a particular mode of production, during the Cultural Revolution it was spectacularly vulgarized and stretched to the point of near-lunacy, where it became a confused hodgepodge that was totally pointless and toothless. As class analysis disintegrated, different social groups picked up its disparate fragments and deploy them for their own particular uses. Generating immense tension in the society at large, the resulting ”hyper-politicization” had much distorted the social and political life of the People's Republic, all in the noble name of revolution and class struggle. An orgy of senseless violence was unleashed to target people mostly in relatively subordinate or powerless positions, and especially those millions of Chinese who had been branded “bad” class designations and thereby deprived of citizenship rights. Suffice it to say here that excessive political violence of the Cultural-Revolutionary years had exhausted most people. This had inevitably contributed to the pervasive alienation and demoralization of very broad segments of the Chinese populace, so that after Mao's death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping's policy of economic development and modernization became immensely popular, as the people came to see Deng as one who would lead China forward from the dark days of arbitrary violence and tyranny. In hindsight, in spite of its extreme vigilance against restorative tendencies, the Cultural Revolution attacked the individual bureaucrats and remnant exploiting classes more than the very system of domination by an incipient bureaucratic class. Maoist class politics as an ideological offensive failed to fundamentally address the problem of the bureaucracy, although it was indeed a major achievement by itself that it had succeeded in temporarily interrupting the consolidation of the ruling class, by its various attempts to revolutionize “culture,” to promote “proletarian consciousness,” and to exhort the cadres to “serve the people” rather than serving themselves. Hence it is no mere accident that the Cultural Revolution emerged as a “cultural revolution” in the first place-the Cultural Revolution was indeed cultural in very significant sense of the term. It may even be possible to argue that such attempts of “revolutionization through the realm of culture” not only represents Maoism's highest political development, but ipso facto its historical limits as well. While the Cultural Revolution disclosed as well as challenged in major ways the problems of Chinese socialism, it was unable to solve them. In spite that it created a potentially revolutionary situation in which the energy of mass struggle was unleashed, the Cultural Revolution left virtually untouched the basic structural and functional divisions between rulers and ruled. As Whither China proclaimed in 1968: “Social reforms were aborted, social changes were not consolidated and thoroughly realized, and the 'end' of the great cultural revolution has not been reached. As the masses have said, 'Everything remains the same after so much ado.'”

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