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The Cultural Revolution Revisited: Dissonance Reduction or Power Maximization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Paul J. Hiniker
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The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution began with the publication of Yao Wenyuan's article, “Comment on the new historical play ‘Hai Rui Dismissed from Office’,” which alluded to Chairman Mao's summary dismissal of Defence Minister Peng Dehuai six years earlier. The article first appeared in the 10 November 1965 issue of the Shanghai Wen Hui Daily under Chairman Mao's personal direction through the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee. The curious unrolling of the Cultural Revolution during the subsequent three years through the consolidating Ninth Party Congress in the spring of 1969, exhibited three essential characteristics: first of all, an unprecedented increase in proselytizing for the Thought of Mao Zedong; secondly, an unprecedented leftist purging of the majority of the Politburo and Central Committee leadership; and finally, an unprecedented infusion of outside youth and soldiers of the People's Liberation Army to fill the vacated leadership posts.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 94 , June 1983 , pp. 282 - 303
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1983

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References

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36. Among the highly committed Politburo members rab=0·97 and the regression equation is an a = 1·1 + 2·1 b where “a” is the increased number of articles published after the failure and “b” is the number of articles published before the failure. Among the less committed rab = –0·61 and the slope of the regression line changes direction yielding a=0·8–1·2b.

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41. Ibid.

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43. Ibid. pp. 229–47. For further analysis based upon scaling and content analysis of People's Daily, see Hiniker, Paul and Perlstein, Jolanta J., “Alteration of charismatic and bureaucratic styles of leadership in Communist China,” Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4, 01 1978CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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45. Renmin ribao, 3 January 1969.

46. See Hiniker, , Revolutionary Ideology and Chinese Reality, pp. 307–314Google Scholar. See also Kiesler, Charles, The Psychology of Commitment (New York: Academic Press, 1971), pp. 25–33Google Scholar. The nine items selected do, indeed, form a unidimensional scale: the average item to total scale correlation is 0·70; the average inter-item correlation is also high, π/π max = 0·69. When subjected to Guttman scale analysis to test the ordinality of the nine items along the commitment dimension, they yield a coefficient of reproducibility of 0·94. In a perfect scale, the responses of a subject to all of the items can be reproduced from knowledge of his rank position alone; in our commitment scale, 94% of the responses of the 23 Politburo members can be reproduced from knowledge of the member's rank alone. This implies that a member who ranked low, e.g. Deng Xiaoping, practically never endorsed an item not also endorsed by a higher ranking individual such as Liu Shaoqi; and similarly Liu practically never endorsed an item not also endorsed by an even higher ranking member such as Lin Biao. See Torgerson, Warren S.Theory and Methods of Scaling (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1967), pp. 307–331Google Scholar.

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48. Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Free Press, 1964), esp. pp. 324–406Google Scholar on the types of authority.

49. Black, Cyril E., The Dynamics of Modernization (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), pp. 1–100Google Scholar. See also Almond, Gabriel and Powell, G. Bingham, Comparative Politics: A Development Approach (Boston, Little Brown, 1966)Google Scholar. As applied to China, see Schwartz, Benjamin, “Modernization and the Maoist vision,” MacFarquhar, Roderick (ed.) China Under Mao (Cambridge: MIT Press), pp. 3–19Google Scholar.

50. Hirshman, Albert O., Exit, Voice and Loyalty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 93–95Google Scholar.

51. Ibid. p. 95. See also the perceptive article by Kolakowski, Leszek in Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977)Google Scholar.

52. Brinton, Crane, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1965), esp. pp. 122, 132Google Scholar.

53. Ibid. p. 122.

54. Ibid. pp. 235–36.