During the violent early years of China’s Cultural Revolution, the province of Guangxi experienced by far the largest death toll of any comparable region. One explanation for the extreme violence emphasizes a process of collective killings focused on households in rural communities that were long categorized as class enemies by the regime. From this perspective, the high death tolls were generated by a form of collective behavior reminiscent of genocidal intergroup violence in Bosnia, Rwanda, and similar settings. Evidence from investigations conducted in China in the 1980s reveals the extent to which the killings were part of a province-wide suppression of rebel insurgents, carried out by village militia, who also targeted large numbers of noncombatants. Guangxi’s death tolls were the product of a counterinsurgency campaign that more closely resembled the massacres of communists and suspected sympathizers coordinated by Indonesia’s army in wake of the coup that deposed Sukarno in 1965.

Glacier sliding is commonly linked with elevated water pressure at the glacier bed. Ice surface motion during a 3 week period encompassing an outburst of ice-dammed Hidden Creek Lake (HCL) at Kennicott Glacier, Alaska, USA, showed enhanced sliding during the flood. Two stakes, 1.2 km from HCL, revealed increased speed in two episodes, both associated with uplift of the ice surface relative to the trajectory of bed-parallel motion. Uplift of the surface began 12 days before the flood, initially stabilizing at a value of 0.25 m. Two days after lake drainage began, further uplift (reaching 0.4 m) occurred while surface speed peaked at 1.2 md–1. Maximum surface uplift coincided with peak discharge from HCL, high water level in a down-glacier ice-marginal basin, and low solute concentrations in the Kennicott River. Each of these records is consistent with high subglacial water pressure. We interpret the ice surface motion as arising from sliding up backs of bumps on the bed, which enlarges cavities and produces bed separation. The outburst increased water pressure over a broad region, promoting sliding, inhibiting cavity closure, and blocking drainage of solute-rich water from the distributed system. Pressure drop upon termination of the outburst drained water from and depressurized the distributed system, reducing sliding speeds. Expanded cavities then collapsed with a 1 day time-scale set by the local ice thickness.

Ice-dammed Hidden Creek Lake, Alaska, USA, outbursts annually in about 2–3 days. As the lake fills, a wedge of water penetrates beneath the glacier, and the surface of this ‘ice dam’ rises; the surface then falls as the lake drains. Detailed optical surveying of the glacier near the lake allows characterization of ice-dam deformation. Surface uplift rate is close to the rate of lake-level rise within about 400 m of the lake, then decreases by 90% over about 100 m. Such a steep gradient in uplift rate cannot be explained in terms of ice-dam flexure. Moreover, survey targets spanning the zone of steep uplift gradient move relative to one another in a nearly reversible fashion as the lake fills and drains. Evidently, the zone of steep uplift gradient is a fault zone, with the faults penetrating the entire thickness of the ice dam. Fault motion is in a reverse sense as the lake fills, but in a normal sense as the lake drains. As the overall fault pattern is the same from year to year, even though ice is lost by calving, the faults must be regularly regenerated, probably by linkage of surface and bottom crevasses as ice is advected toward the lake basin.

Ice-marginal Hidden Creek Lake, Alaska, USA, outbursts annually over the course of 2–3 days. As the lake fills, survey targets on the surface of the ‘ice dam’ (the glacier adjacent to the lake) move obliquely to the ice margin and rise substantially. As the lake drains, ice motion speeds up, becomes nearly perpendicular to the face of the ice dam, and the ice surface drops. Vertical movement of the ice dam probably reflects growth and decay of a wedge of water beneath the ice dam, in line with established ideas about jökulhlaup mechanics. However, the distribution of vertical ice movement, with a narrow (50–100 m wide) zone where the uplift rate decreases by 90%, cannot be explained by invoking flexure of the ice dam in a fashion analogous to tidal flexure of a floating glacier tongue or ice shelf. Rather, the zone of large uplift-rate gradient is a fault zone: ice-dam deformation is dominated by movement along high-angle faults that cut the ice dam through its entire thickness, with the sense of fault slip reversing as the lake drains. Survey targets spanning the zone of steep uplift gradient move relative to one another in a nearly reversible fashion as the lake fills and drains. The horizontal strain rate also undergoes a reversal across this zone, being compressional as the lake fills, but extensional as the lake drains. Frictional resistance to fault-block motion probably accounts for the fact that lake level falls measurably before the onset of accelerated horizontal motion and vertical downdrop. As the overall fault pattern is the same from year to year, even though ice is lost by calving, the faults must be regularly regenerated, probably by linkage of surface and bottom crevasses as ice is advected toward the lake basin.

Contrary to its initiators’ intentions, the Cultural Revolution laid political foundations for a transition to a market-oriented economy whilst also creating circumstances that helped to ensure the cohesion and survival of China's Soviet-style party-state. The Cultural Revolution left the Chinese Communist Party and civilian state structures weak and in flux, and drastically weakened entrenched bureaucratic interests that might have blocked market reform. The weakening of central government structures created a decentralized planned economy, the regional and local leaders of which were receptive to initial market-oriented opportunities. The economic and technological backwardness fostered by the Cultural Revolution left little support for maintaining the status quo. Mao put Deng Xiaoping in charge of rebuilding the Party and economy briefly in the mid-1970s before purging him a second time, inadvertently making him the standard-bearer for post-Mao rebuilding and recovery. Mutual animosities with the Soviet Union provoked by Maoist polemics led to a surprising strategic turn to the United States and other Western countries in the early 1970s. The resulting economic and political ties subsequently advanced the agenda of reform and opening. China's first post-Mao decade was therefore one of rebuilding and renewal under a pre-eminent leader who was able to overcome opposition to a new course. The impact of this legacy becomes especially clear when contrasted with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, where political circumstances were starkly different, and where Gorbachev's attempts to implement similar changes in the face of entrenched bureaucratic opposition led to the collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet state.

Over the past decade, the ownership and control of China's corporate sector has finally begun to depart fundamentally from patterns typical in the socialist past. Students of corporate governance have watched these changes with an intense curiosity about their impact on firm performance. Students of comparative economic institutions have examined them for hints of a new variety of Asian capitalism and have sought to anticipate China's international competitiveness and impact. But these changes potentially will create a new corporate elite with greater compensation, personal wealth, and independence from government agencies than ever before. This transformation of China's political economy may eventually alter the Chinese state itself, although the extent and nature of this change are still far from clear. The key questions of interest are the social origins of the new elite, the scale of the economic assets they control, and especially their continuing relationships with party and government agencies. The answers will vary decisively by sector, four of which are described here: a state-owned sector, a privatized sector, a transactional sector, and an entrepreneurial sector. The evolving mix of these sectors will determine the future contours of the Chinese corporate economy.

The Nanjing Incident of late March 1976 was a precursor of, and according to some analysts a trigger for, the more famous Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 4–5 April. The two protests have widely been interpreted as spontaneous outpourings of dissent from Cultural Revolution radicalism, expressed through mourning for the recently deceased premier, Zhou Enlai. A closer look at the background to these demonstrations in Nanjing reveals that the protests there occurred in the midst of, and in response to, a vigorous public offensive by former leaders of rebel factions to overthrow civilian cadres for reversing Cultural Revolution policies. The outpouring of respect for Zhou – and criticism of Politburo radicals – mobilized enormous numbers of ordinary citizens onto the city streets, far larger numbers than the rebel leaders were able to muster. This demonstrated the disappearance of the popular support rebel leaders had briefly enjoyed a decade before. While the Nanjing protests were unanticipated by either the rebel leaders or the Party officials they sought to overthrow, they were only the latest in a series of local political confrontations.

In the first five years after the onset of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, one of the largest political upheavals of the twentieth century paralyzed a highly centralized party state, leading to a harsh regime of military control. Despite a wave of post-Mao revelations in the 1980s, knowledge about the nationwide impact of this insurgency and its suppression remains selective and impressionistic, based primarily on a handful of local accounts. Employing a data set drawn from historical narratives published in 2,213 county and city annals, this article charts the temporal and geographic spread of a mass insurgency, its evolution through time, and the repression through which militarized state structures were rebuilt. Comparisons of published figures with internal investigation reports and statistical estimates from sample selection models yield estimates that range from 1.1 to 1.6 million deaths and 22 to 30 million direct victims of some form of political persecution. The vast majority of casualties were due to repression by authorities, not the actions of insurgents. Despite the large overall death toll, per capita death rates were considerably lower than a range of comparable cases, including the Soviet purges at the height of Stalinist terror in the late 1930s.

China experienced extensive civil strife in 1974, as elite factionalism during the “criticize Lin Biao and Confucius” campaign revived popular contention in the provinces. Past research has characterized these conflicts as a “second Cultural Revolution” – an offensive by resurgent red guards and rebels to resist the restoration of purged civilian officials to powerful posts. In Nanjing, however, the conflicts were of an entirely different nature. Civilian cadres directed the campaign against army officers who still dominated civilian government throughout the province. Popular protests in Nanjing were not led by former rebels, whose ranks had been decimated by unusually harsh military suppression campaigns, but were instead protests by ordinary citizens who had suffered in the purges and rustication campaigns of the late 1960s. While the campaign in cities like Hangzhou and Wuhan was an offensive by resurgent rebels against civilian officials, in Nanjing civilian officials used the campaign to ensure their victory over military rivals. The Hangzhou and Wuhan pattern revived the politics of the 1960s, while the Nanjing pattern anticipated the protests against Cultural Revolution abuses characteristic of the end of the Mao era.

China's protracted regional conflicts of 1967 and 1968 have long been understood as struggles between conservative and radical forces whose opposed interests were so deeply rooted in existing patterns of power and privilege that they defied the imposition of military control. This study of Nanjing, a key provincial capital that experienced prolonged factional conflict, yields a new explanation: the conflicts were prolonged precisely because they could not be characterized as pitting “conservatives” against “radicals”, making it difficult for central officials, local military forces, or Mao Zedong to decide how to resolve them. Furthermore, Beijing officials, regional military forces, and local civilian cadres were themselves divided against one another, exacerbating and prolonging local conflicts. In competing for approval from central authorities, local factions adopted opportunistic and rapidly shifting political stances designed to portray their opponents as reactionary conservatives—charges that had no basis in fact.

Scholarship on factional warfare during the first two years of the Cultural Revolution has long portrayed a struggle between “conservative” factions that sought to preserve the status quo and “radical” factions that sought to transform it. Recent accounts, however, claim that the axis of political conflict was fundamentally transformed after the fall of civilian governments in early 1967, violating the central tenet of this interpretation. A close examination of Nanjing's abortive power seizure of January 1967 addresses this issue in some depth. The power seizure in fact was a crucial turning point: it removed the defenders of local authorities from the political stage and generated a split between two wings of the rebel movement that overthrew them. The political divisions among former rebel allies intensified and hardened in the course of tortuous negotiations in Beijing that were buffeted by confusing political shifts in the capital. This created a contest that was not between “conservatives” and “radicals” over the restoration of the status quo, but about the respective places of the rival radical factions in restored structures of authority.

For two years after the summer of 1966, Beijing University was racked by factional conflict and escalating violence. Despite the intensity of the struggle the factions did not express didfferences in political doctrine or orientation towards the status quo. Nie Yuanzi, the veteran Party cadre who advanced rapidly in the municipal hierarchy after denouncing both the old Beida Party Committee and the work team, fiercely defended her growing power against opponents led by several former allies. Compromise proved impossible as mutual accusations intensified, and interventions by national politicians served only to entrench the divisions. The conflicts were bitter and personal not because they expressed differences between status groups, but because the rivals knew one another so well, had so much in common, and because the consequences of losing in this struggle were so dire.

Evidence from sample surveys and local field studies have long supported opposed arguments about the impact of market reform on the value of political office in the rural economy. This article reviews the evidence, describes a gradual convergence in findings, and identifies unresolved questions about qualitatively different local paths of development. Examining previously unexploited data from a nationally representative 1996 survey, a resolution of the remaining issues becomes evident. The value of political office initially is very modest, as the first private entrepreneurs reaped large incomes. However, subsequent economic development led to rapid increases in the earning power of cadres and their kin, and by the end of the Deng era the returns to political office were roughly equal to those of private entrepreneurs. The political advantages were not limited to regions that industrialized rapidly under collective ownership: they were large even in regions where the private economy was most extensive. However, despite evidence of large and enduring political advantages, those who reaped wealth from political position were only a small fraction of the newly rich, the vast majority of whom achieved wealth without current or past office-holding or kinship ties to cadres.

Tan Lifu was a Red Guard leader whose August 1966 speech in defence of the Party's class line and his university's work team has long been considered key evidence for social interpretations of Red Guard factionalism. New documentation – including the complete transcript of the original speech – shows that Tan's case deviates sharply from the reputed profile of “conservative” students. Tan in fact espoused a version of the Party's class line that did not differ from the one advocated by those who denounced him; his “rebel” opponents at Beijing Industrial University were also organized and led by students from revolutionary cadre backgrounds; and Tan supported the (second) work team sent to his school because (unlike the first) it conducted a ferocious purge of a Party leadership against whom Tan harboured strong grievances. The case illustrates the ways that the politics of the work team period split students from similar backgrounds into opposing camps rather than sorting them into factions based on differences in family background.

Information extracted from 1,520 county annals published after 1987 is used to estimate the timing and impact of the Cultural Revolution in rural China. Outside observers initially concluded that the movement had little impact on remote rural regions, while early post-Mao revelations suggested that the opposite was the case. Adjusting for the tendency of shorter accounts to report fewer casualties, and with additional assumptions about under-reporting in the longer and more detailed accounts, the authors derive an estimated death toll of between 750,000 and 1.5 million, a similar number of people permanently injured, and 36 million who suffered some form of political persecution. The vast majority of these casualties occurred from 1968 to 1971, after the end of the period of popular rebellion and factional conflict and the establishment of provisional organs of local state power.

A generation of research on red guard politics has traced the origins of its debilitating factionalism to social and political divisions that were well established among students on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. These social interpretations impute political motives to student activists according to their positions in the pre-Cultural Revolution status quo. However, a closer examination of events in Beijing during the summer and early autumn of 1966—where the Red Guards and their factional divisions first emerged—suggests a different interpretation. Factions emerged when student activists from similar social backgrounds responded differently to ambiguous and rapidly changing political signals. These initial acts left students on opposite sides of an emerging political divide and exposed them to unforeseen risks as the movement took unpredictable turns. In this interpretation, student divisions are rooted in political interactions in the early phases of the conflict itself. Red Guard factions did not emerge in Beijing as expressions of opposed group interests based on preexisting social divisions, but as struggles to vindicate earlier actions and to avoid the harsh fate of political victims.