variety of policies

The Yenan generation who ruled China might have seemed, until 1966, a compact homogenous group of dedicated [unclear: Costs] whose main differences had been hammered out during intervals in the bitter gnerilla war before complete control of mainland China was secured. But if anyone was hallucinated by this appearance of monolithic unity, he need not have waited until 1966 to be undeceived. For the Yenan generation, from 1949 on, had presided over a bewildering variety of economic and social polictes, many in diametrical opposition to one another.

The Soviet-style central planning up to 1955, the extreme and disastrons ecnomic decentralisation of the Great Leap Forward period from 1957 to 1960, and the slow pragmatie combination of less rigid planning and less extreme decentralisation which has existed since 1961 mark three wholly distinct economic choices none of them compatible with the other.

It takes little background in political theory to realise how wholly different were the "Let Many Flowers Blossom" campaign of 1956 and the "rectification" campaign which succeeded it. In foreign policy an unquestloning role of junior partner to Stalin's Russia had been displaced by a gradual turning against post-stalinist Russia comptetely.

Only one thing remained coustant between 1949 and 1956: impacable antagonism between the men of Yenan and the men in the White House and the pentagon.

The institutional structure of post-1949 China mirrored the contradietions implicit in its policy zig-zags. whereas in Hussia the state was officially suppsed to be withering away, the withering away of the Communist Party in China was not de jure but de facto. In defiance of the Part's constitution the CCP has held no conference since 1955. The principal legislative body, the National People's Congress, in defiance of the state constitution did not meet at all in 1967. The last Central Committee plenum before the 1966 plenum which launched the Red Guard movement was in 1962.

The cloak of unity, the disguise of impeccable political rectitude meant more than ever by 1966 that the Emperor's successors also had no clothes. This was the more grave in that the life span, not just of Mao, but of his entire generation, was drawing to a close, while the reliability of the younger generation was untested and its orthodoxy unknown.

During the 1956 "Let Many Flowers Blossom" campaign, in fact it had been the younger generation which had most strongly criticised the Party for disloyalty to its own principles. "There is serious bureaucracy ... ." Liu Shao-chii had said at that time. (1) "Mass criticism is spreading to every corner of China, including factories, farms, schools and other organisations. The target of criticism is the leadership."

Slowly the disintegration of the Party as a democratic centralist organisation was isolating the control of the Party in the bands of a few older cadres at the Party centre, whose differences were becoming sharper and were becomming less and less capable of resolution within the Party Structure as that structure atrophied through disuse.

The various mistakes of the various wings of the leadership, the blunders, the fatuities, the follies, the misjudgements, for so long denied to be as much as possible in the Maoist order of things, were becoming more and more obvious.

A situation was building up to where the Party could not avoid coming to terms with its entire past. As Sartre wrote of the Rakost regime in Hungary, a point had to come after all errors had been denied when all the dirty washing would finally be produeed all at one go, and would have to be dealt with in its entirety. This would hapen at a time when china was unprecendentdly isolated, its relations with all states except Pakistan, Burma and Abania having reached an all-time low.

The Yenan generation was facing a crisis.

Its survival was at stake. An economic crisis seemed near when the 1966 harvest was bad; it was inevitable that the power struggle within the Central Committee would have to be resolved, the seventeen years of unity finally sundered, the myth of the infallibility of the leadership abandoned. How could this be done without calling the revolution itself into question?

It was Mao who faced the question of his generation's succession crisis most squarely. The machinery by which power would have been transmitted from one generation to another with Communist legitimacy had broken down with the procedure for convoking annual conferences. New machinery had, therefore, to be improvised. It had to be however, in some sense "revolutionary" machinery.

Mao's solution to this dilemma was brilliant: if the party of the revolution were defunct be would launch a new revolution, "cultural" rather than "newdemocratic", which would purge his enemies in the Party in accordance with unquestionable "revolutionary" morality. The revolution of 1931-1949 would be parodied to serve the aims of Mao and his clique.