Professor Hong Yung Lee’s book The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution is a great book in Chinese Cultural Revolution

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Hong Yung Lee. The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Case Study. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Professor Hong Yung Lee’s book The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution is a great book in Chinese Cultural Revolution studies. Professor Lee introduced the mass into the research and succeeded in analyzing the interdependent relations between elite and mass in the Cultural Revolution from vertical and horizontal perspectives. Red Guard newspapers as a source strengthen the reliability of this book.

Lee frames the Cultural Revolution in a two-stratum framework: the upper elite and the mass. During the course of the Cultural Revolution, the elite of China had become fragmented over issues of policy, values, personality and power, although this fragmenting began before the start of the Cultural Revolution. Accordingly, the urban masses were also divided along age, occupational, class, and ideological lines. Lee identifies seven political “actor” on three levels: the supreme leader, Mao, at the top; the elites, in the middle, including the Cultural Revolution Small Group, the army, the Party, the government; and the masses, including the radical mass organization and the conservative mass organization at the bottom.

The Cultural Revolution began as an elite conflict. One group of elite around Mao, represented primarily by the Cultural Revolution Small Group, emphasized the necessity of narrowing the gap between the two as essential to maintaining the impetus of the revolution. The other group, represented primarily by the Party organization, believed the narrowing-gap policies disturb the function efficiency of the Chinese political system, and would endanger China’s economic development.

Lee applied interest-group approaches to his horizontal-vertical analysis of the Cultural Revolution process. For Lee, the Cultural Revolution was a period during which the various competing elite groups mobilized sympathetic social sectors to attack their elite opponents. In turn, these various segments of the populace used the opportunity to support those members of the elite which had policy preferences, interests, and values most congruent with their own. Hence, at the horizontal mass level, the mobilized Chinese masses, caring about their own narrow group interests, divided into two broad factions: the radical mass organization consisting of underprivileged social groups, aimed at the radical restructuring of the Chinese political system, while the conservative mass organization, consists of those from the better-off social groups supported the maintenance of the political status quo. Thus the vertical coalitions within the elite and mass formed. As the Cultural Revolution unfolded, the Chinese elite became further divided as the Maoist coalition at the top also split along conservative-radical lines, producing a “vertical cleavage” which cut across the “horizontal cleavage” elite and the masses.

Professor Lee carefully analyzes the relationships and interactions among the seven political “actors”. Although these are almost all very large groups, he is still able to draw meaningful conclusions about them. For example, Lee identifies the radical mass organization as largely composed of underprivileged social groups” (p.5), so “their ideology was directed against the entire establishment, particularly against those who held a monopoly on political power” (p.340). On the other side, the conservative mass organization “were heavily drawn from the better-off social groups”, so they “tended to concentrate their attacks on the ‘bourgeois class’, de-emphasizing the ‘power-holders’ and seldom using the term ‘revisionism’” (p.342).

Lee’s penetrating analysis of the Cultural Revolution does not demonstrate perfect when he analyses the groups in mass level. For example, when Lee discussed the students, he often assumes that university and middle school students reacted similarly to Cultural Revolution events, with factionalizaion occurring more or less simultaneously at the universities and secondary schools, and over the same issues. In fact, family factor was a very important determinant for student to choose which side on. Just as some Cultural Revolutions scholars point out, middle school students divided into radicals and conservatives much more clearly on the basis of their family origins than was the case at the university level. University students tended to split over their assessment of Party committees and work teams. The well publicized debate inPekingover “Origin Theory” (which Lee does not discuss) was, after all, essentially limited to middle school students.

Also, Lee doesn’t make the necessary distinction between students from “middle” and “bad” class. So one could make a strong argument that a majority of radical leader (particular at the middle school level) were of middle class origin (such as children of intellectuals), student from bad class origins most often participated only minimally or at all.

To conclude, this is a superb book, successfully describing the complicated political relations of various interest groups under that turbulent social context.

Jun Zhang