only solution

Ingenious though this solution was, it was the only solution possible. So long as all other means of mass participation in decision-making were closed Mao could at once appear to appeal to the masses against "bureaucracy" while safeguarding the almost superstitious rever ence in which the Party centre was held—and to which it owed its power—by simultaneously fostering a Cult of his own personality. No real "Great Debate" would ever be held. The dissident views of Liu Shao-chi, Peng Chen or Lo Jui-chin would never be made public, and inner-Party decision making would never be democratised, while the Red Guards, the more loyal to Mao because he had given them their first taste of power and implicitly promised their generation the succession, ran rampant.

Where, in 1956, Liu might have seemed the white hope of the younger cadres, by 1966 there could be no doubt that their only hope was Mao, whose cult combined uniquely the most rigid doctrinal orthodoxy and loyalty to the leadership with a grotesquely farouche iconoclasm which resembled most a mediaeval heresy hunt.

The focal point of the red Guard attack on the existing power structure—whose only parellel was the activities such right-wing groups as KAMI and KAPI in Indonesia during the post-Gestapu massacres of PKI members—was on the university authorities and especially on the authorities who controlled the selection and recruitment of Communist Party cadres.

The Significance of this needs little stress: basically what the Red Guards were attacking were the old procedures by which students were allotted political power, and of course a place in the Party bureancracy Differences between various Red Guard groups probably corresponded to various kinds of bureaueratie ambition This lead, ultimately, also to conflict with existing municipal and state bureaucracies.

The students, the most privileged group in Chinese Communist society, and the principal beneficiaries of the 1949 revolution—previously children of workers and peasants could not have entered either a "middle school" or a university—wanted to secure their careers, and it was for this reason the April plenum of Party urged them forward, and not the workers, to whome the Cultural Revolution could only offer greater sacrifice and lower wages after initial attacks, even physical one bystudent fanatics.

In Shanghai, the city where Mao, initiated the "cultural revolution", and also, significantly the most prosperous city in modern China, only half of the waterfront workers joined the "Revolutionary' Rebels."