Twilight in Zhongnanhai

The China field faces a dilemma so pervasive, and so embarrassing for China hands to admit, that some members of the public could be forgiven for having no awareness of it at all: our access to reliable sources on elite politics is appalling. Compared to the West, where top-level political deliberations can become public knowledge within hours, China’s current elite political system is almost impenetrable; access to solid information on past periods in modern China’s elite politics, while less dire, remains limited. What does this mean for historians and analysts who wish to use the past to better understand China’s present? With records so gap-ridden, contradictory, and occasionally obviously false, is there much utility in studying the Mao era and other historical periods at all, or must we wait until the Chinese government is prepared to finally open its archives in full?  

 

Frederick C. Teiwes’ and Warren Sun’s answer to this dilemma in their extraordinary The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution is twofold: first, to leave no stone unturned, no written source unexamined against overlapping accounts, and no Chinese political historian unconsulted; second, to be as transparent as possible about which aspects of the record are known, which aspects are dubious, and what must necessarily be left to speculation. The result is the best English-language study we can expect for some time of the politics of the final years of Mao’s life, with a number of lessons that students of the Xi Jinping era would do well to heed. 

 

Like Teiwes and Sun’s previous work, The End of the Maoist Era aggressively and persuasively advances a Mao-centric model of Cultural Revolution-era politics that resonates– albeit on a grander scale, and in a vastly different cultural and social context– with Xi Jinping’s increasing domination of the Chinese power apparatus. Mao may have been erratic, withdrawn, and in bad health for much of the period the authors describe, but his whim remained inviolable law. When esteemed revolutionaries Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, separately deputized to take over the daily running of the government for limited periods between 1971 and 1975, accidentally ran afoul of a hypersensitive Mao, for example, they were denounced, sidelined, and replaced without resistance. At all levels, Mao alone decided who had access to power: he could have removed his hated wife Jiang Qing from political life but worked to protect her seat on the Politburo even as he attempted to check her behavior through intense criticism; he could have ended Deng Xiaoping’s political career after his last sidelining but fatefully chose to keep him in the Chinese Communist Party; he could have institutionalized a consensus-based mechanism for succession but arbitrarily elevated or prompted the promotion of candidates like Wang Hongwen and Hua Guofeng based on his personal impressions of their work and behavior. At no point did any other leader attain power remotely comparable to Mao’s; in almost no cases, insofar as the authors are willing to concede, did any member of the political leadership knowingly contravene his will. (Among the vanishingly few exceptions is a rather pitiful case of what the authors charitably term “symbolic defiance”: once, in 1973, a high-level military official objected to the promotion of a Mao favorite he hated at a party congress, only to reverse himself when reminded that he was opposing Mao’s opinion.)  

 

What do Teiwes and Sun see as the effect of this domination? Oddly enough, the answer appears to be a degree of balance. The authors painstakingly demonstrate that the conventional model of elite politics in the period, which classifies political leaders into groups based on their relationship to the Cultural Revolution, lacks nuance in important respects, but they do not dispute that there were essentially “two camps” at the top of the political apparatus, and Mao is described as periodically shifting back and forth between what could fairly be called the more moderate and more radical forces on the Politburo. Although each side suffered serious setbacks each time Mao shifted the political winds against it, he allowed neither to be knocked out of the game while he was alive (in the authors’ telling, Hua Guofeng kept a relatively moderate hand on the tiller even after Deng’s downfall). Thus, while the authors agree with the traditional categorization of the period 1972-1976 as part of the Cultural Revolution, they emphasize that even the more chaotic junctures in that span never matched the earlier years of anarchic devastation that began in 1966.  

 

No less valuable than the examination of Mao’s influence is the authors’ injection of nuance into– and frequent debunking of– conventional narratives about elite politics in the period. Yes, the Politburo radicals later known as the Gang of Four often coordinated in pursuit of a radical agenda, but they also often went in different directions or failed to move the needle: Gang “member” Wang Hongwen was particularly prone to acts of independence, and the Gang did not puppet its deeply unruly local followers in the manner that conventional narratives allege. Yes, Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai were generally seen as aligned in pursuit of a moderate policy agenda, but there is evidence to suggest that they were not personally close for significant stretches of the period described, and aspects of Deng’s moderate record have been exaggerated by post-Mao sources. No, the Gang did not oppose Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, from the start of his tenure as General Secretary, and nor did they plot to take power in a coup (unlike Hua, who briefly shored up his own power by ousting them in a coup). In short, ostensible political factions were not unified; pragmatic flexibility trumped ideological consistency in an age when considerations of political survival reigned supreme; and while institutional norms did fail shortly after Mao’s death in the form of the arrest of several Politburo members, they did so because the new General Secretary and his supporters willed it, not because they were confronted with a preexisting breakdown of the institutional order.

 

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Perhaps most interesting for observers of Xi-era politics, despite the many social, economic, cultural, and political disparities between this era and Mao’s, are the authors’ conclusions about the period following Mao’s death. Given Xi’s ever-increasing personalization of Chinese politics, although he can never attain a status equal to Mao’s, the immediate post-Mao period offers an important lesson on the institutional and normative resilience of the PRC’s political apparatus in the face of leadership vacuums like the one that will emerge when Xi departs the scene. 

 

On this point, there are some surprises. First, The End of the Maoist Era contests the conventional narrative that a well-connected military veteran, Ye Jianying, was the driving force behind the post-Mao introduction of force into elite politics in the shape of the arrest of the Gang of Four. While Ye played an important advisory role, it was the much-maligned civilian leader of the government, Hua Guofeng, who drove the process. Even more intriguingly, the authors conclude that in the weeks leading up to the purge, military leaders (not including Ye, who was outside the formal chain of command) “apparently did not even formulate a vague position concerning the unfolding situation,” and the People’s Liberation Army ultimately amounted to “a force in the wings that took no initiative for its own interests.” This finding is all the more surprising in light of the military’s drastically expanded role in the governance of Chinese localities during the Cultural Revolution period, which the authors describe as a development that Mao took seriously and made repeated efforts to reverse. Why this was the case, and whether and to what extent the factors that ensured the People’s Liberation Army’s quiescence in times of political transition remain in effect in the present era, are questions that warrant serious attention.  

 

Similarly noteworthy is the extent to which the civilian political and governing apparatus, which was subjected to devastating assault in the final decade of Mao’s life, came through the disruption of Mao’s death intact. The authors believe that Mao’s schizophrenic handling of the Cultural Revolution created “internal tensions [that] exploded less than a month after his passing” in the form of the coup against the Gang of Four, but their detailed reconstruction of that coup is perhaps less evocative of an explosion than something more akin to surgery. True, Gang supporters in Shanghai attempted to make trouble after the arrest of the Gang by mobilizing the local militia and talking big about a violent response, but they gave up almost as soon as they started upon realizing that they were simply acting too late. One should not go too far in claiming that the political order held its shape, perhaps; the authors do not cover enough of the post-Mao era in this volume to explore the gradual shift from Hua to Deng in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, and that period provides grist for arguments of the irreconcilability of the political “camps” that Mao left behind. Nonetheless, the ability of the system in the period covered to remain largely intact and carry on after the loss of its first and only leader– as it had done before in episodes of disruption that Mao created, and as it would do again in crises to come– serves as another indication of the Chinese regime’s structural resilience amidst political challenges, for good or ill.​

 

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Given the problems inherent in the field, how reliable are these findings? Fortunately, unlike most authors, Teiwes and Sun do not require that their conclusions be taken on faith: The End of the Maoist Era provides a detailed analysis of the shortcomings of the documentary record throughout the footnotes and main text, enabling a close evaluation of its arguments’ validity. 

 

If The End of the Maoist Era has an analytical weakness at its heart, it is its core refrain that Mao was not only the supreme authority in this period, but was also behind virtually every meaningful political development that occurred before his final incapacitation and death. Many of the book’s claims surrounding Mao’s agency in the decision-making process are persuasively argued and predicated on a detailed examination of the historical data; just as many are confessedly speculative. They are also perhaps beside the point. The removals of Zhou and Deng from the apex of the administrative apparatus are sufficient to establish that Mao’s will was law when he cared enough to express it. In the numerous areas where the documentary record is inadequate, the question of the degree to which individual decision-making was possible at levels below Mao should be left open, particularly when one considers the inordinate difficulty Mao’s subordinates frequently had determining what he wanted.  

 

The authors’ other major findings, including on the flaws in the “Gang of Four” paradigm and the crucial events surrounding its purge, are by and large so exhaustively detailed that they are as persuasive as they can be in light of the restrictions on the body of evidence available– a significant and inescapable caveat. Might it be that evidence of political agency on the part of the PLA following the death of Mao is waiting to be discovered outside the narrow range of presently available sources? It is hardly difficult to imagine the regime regarding such material as unfit for publication. What about clearer evidence of Deng Xiaoping being something less than the principled opponent of Mao’s stance on the Cultural Revolution that his daughter, among other post-Hua commentators, makes him out to be– a mythology the authors labor to undermine, but with the acknowledged obstacle that much of the relevant historical record remains politically suppressed? What, if anything, was the nature of Zhou and Deng’s interaction behind the scenes for vast stretches of time between spring 1973 and autumn 1974, when Deng is widely supposed to have been Zhou’s moderate ally and protege despite a dearth of information about their relationship? 

 

If these unavoidable gaps are weaknesses of the book, Teiwes’ and Sun’s intellectual honesty enables us to derive a certain degree of benefit even from the holes in the narrative: by explaining in considerable detail what aspects of the record are deficient, they show us precisely where we should direct our attention when the body of available information expands. This is a valuable service that few books in this field– or, indeed, in others– provide.  

 

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The End of the Maoist Era leaves its final story incomplete, if Hua Guofeng’s pre-Third Plenum period of primacy deserves to be called a story unto itself: at 627 pages, the authors call time at the purge of the Gang of Four, just a few weeks after the death of Mao. They will finish their examination of the impact of Mao’s decisions on the post-Mao pecking order in an upcoming volume (of which voluminous chapter preprints have already been released), preliminarily titled Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping, and the Dismantling of Maoism. Apportioning the relatively brief Hua era into two separate volumes when it arguably constitutes one analytical whole may be less than ideal for the reader, but when one considers the length and depth of the analysis that preceded the purge of the Gang of Four in The End of the Maoist Era, the choice becomes entirely understandable.  

 

If The End of the Maoist Era is any indication, Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping, and the Dismantling of Maoism will feature new and valuable insights that challenge conventional interpretations of the post-Mao period. All China-watchers, regardless of specialty, would benefit from reading both volumes. Like all of Teiwes’ and Sun’s research, what The End of the Maoist Era lacks in readability, it makes up for in unmatched rigor, extraordinary detail, and all-too-rare analytical transparency. If its sequel is able to attain its standard of quality, it will bring us closer to a truly accurate understanding of Chinese politics.