Prelude to Revolution: Mao, the Party, and the Peasant Question

Perhaps the most dramatic era in recent Chinese history is the period known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In this book, Richard Baum examines the origins of the Cultural Revolution in three interrelated phenomena: the emergence of intense political conflicts between Mao Tse-tung and his chief lieutenant over the aims and instrumentalities of China’s post-revolutionary development, the rise of bureaucratic conservatism and administrative corruption in China’s vast countryside, and the vicissitudes of the Socialist Education Movement (1962-66) which immediately preceded - and gave rise to - the Cultural Revolution. Baum describes the growing schism between Mao and his Chief-of-State Liu Shao-ch'i and Party Secretary-General Teng Hsiao-p'ing. The differing political styles of these men and their radically divergent programs for dealing with the problems of rural leadership and administration precipitated a direct confrontation between Mao and Liu, resulting in the latter’s purge during the Cultural Revolution. The Socialist Education Movement, begun to clean up the rural Party and state administrative apparatus, resulted in the purging of more than one million local officials in the countryside. Its ultimate failure revealed Mao’s lack of control over the Party bureaucracy and was a major cause of the extra-Party activities associated with the Cultural Revolution. At issue in the Socialist Education Movement was the critical question "Who guards the guardians themselves?" - how to preserve the political and ideological purity of a revolutionary Party in a post-revolutionary era.