The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (64 page)

In September 1965 an article appeared in a Shanghai newspaper criticizing a historical play, written in 1961, on the subject of the Ming official Hai Rui , renowned for his principled opposition to the Emperor's employment of bad counsellors. The play was a political parable, which had been carefully prepared and endlessly discussed to sharpen its political point. It was one of a number of works of literature from the period after the collapse of the
Great Leap Forward
in which historical figures were used as political parallels. Its main point was the implicit identification of Hai Rui with Marshal Peng Dehuae , who had been dismissed from his posts for his tenacious opposition to the Great Leap. The critical article was published in Shanghai because Mao no longer had sufficient influence in the capital to secure its publication there.
The right wing were alarmed at the criticism, which they rightly saw as the beginning of a political attack on their policies and their positions. The justification given for this attack was that the Communist Party of China had become virtually a new and increasingly hereditary upper class; privilege was rife. Mao said: ‘The officials of China are a class, and one whose interests are opposed to those of the workers and peasants.’ Facing resistance to his condemnation of the offending play, he appealed to the young of China to launch their own criticism of privilege and the policies which bred privilege. The attack was not intended to be against persons; in the eyes of the Cultural Revolution leaders, it was the system that had to be criticized on the grounds that, in spite of the socialization of the means of production, relations between leaders and led were essentially still ‘capitalist’ and reforms modelled on those that had already begun in Eastern Europe and would only make the system worse. Mao's amanuensis, Chen Boda , in planning a new revolutionary play, described its central character: he was to be a man of perfect integrity and infinite conscientiousness, yet a tyrant; but he is not personally a tyrant; it is the system that leaves him no choice.
Liu Shaoqi attempted to keep the movement within bounds by dispatching work teams to the universities and colleges. The students resisted. Mao sided with them, and published among their wall posters a poster of his own, ‘Bombard the Headquarters’, indicating that it was the Party leadership who should be the main target of attack, not a few intellectuals. This led to the escalation of the protest into a serious political movement.
The seeds of bitter conflict had by then already been sown, when the ‘Red Guards’ (the student organizations) split into two factions: the so-called moderates who were led largely by the favoured children of the Party leaders, and were moderate only in their attempts to protect their parents but were violently immoderate in their attacks on writers and artists; and the ‘radicals’ who were often led by the children of bourgeois families whose members had been persecuted and discriminated against as well as by the children of workers and peasants. Meanwhile the struggle widened as China's several million deprived casual workers and members of other disadvantaged classes joined the radical students. The new Cultural Revolution leadership, made up of Mao's closest associates, called on the People's Liberation Army to hold the ring and prevent the use of force. Marshal Lin Biao controlled China's centrally based forces, but he did not fully control the provincial forces. As a result, many army units joined in the struggle. Bloodshed and vicious persecution of opponents ensued, and there was an almost complete breakdown of government.
The power of the radicals reached its peak when they proclaimed a ‘Paris Commune’ government of Shanghai to replace the Chinese Communist Party hierarchy. The idea spread to other cities.
This was the critical point in the campaign, but now Mao Zedong stepped in and condemned the Paris Commune, insisting that the Communist Party could ‘not yet’ be superseded. He created a new governing institution, the ‘revolutionary committee’, which brought together representatives of the radicals, cadres who had not been condemned for abuse of power and privilege, and local army units. Through these the Communist Party was to be rebuilt on the basis of popular selection of its cadres. This, however, ensured that with the help of sympathetic units of the armed forces the Party could reassert unchanged authority. Open and popular selection of cadres almost never occurred.
Mao's instructions to his Cultural Revolution followers were deliberately and characteristically vague. When they asked him what new institutions should replace the existing authoritarian system, he told them that if they successfully roused the consciousness of the masses, ‘the problem would solve itself’. The masses would create their own institutions. They did not, and the old party machine soon filled the vacuum ( see
Chinese political thought
). The Cultural Revolution became a protracted rearguard action by the left, until Mao's death and the subsequent arrest of his supporters brought the movement to an end.
The Cultural Revolution has often been represented in the West as a struggle between pragmatism and radical ideology; but to reach this conclusion one must identify pragmatism with a marginally modified form of Stalinism, and ideology with Mao's determination to short-circuit Party bureaucracy by decentralizing decision-making to the local communities. It is sometimes represented as a simple and unprincipled struggle for power; but to accept this one must ignore the many millions of words concerning policy questions which the radicals poured out during the movement, and which expressed the belief that autocracy flourished on the existence of the centralized command economy. It is also interpreted as a struggle between unrepentant Stalinism (represented by Mao and the radicals) and reformed communism; but this ignores the fact that the policies demanded by the radicals were based explicitly on Mao's rejection of Stalinism, now for the first time openly published by the Red Guards.
Such interpretations also ignore the fact that there has been obvious continuity between the Red Guards and the democratic student protesters of
Tiananmen Square
in 1989; they were attacking the same targets, the autocratic abuse of power and privilege by Party leaders. As the Cultural Revolution was more and more frustrated the ideas of those who had participated in the revolt evolved, through the Li Yi Zhe poster of 1974, to Chen Erhjin's
Crossroads Socialism
and the
Fifth Modernization of Wei Jingsheng
of 1978, to the erection of the Goddess of Democracy in Tiananmen Square.
JG 

 
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A voting procedure in which voters have more than one vote in a multicandidate election and may choose to give one vote to each of several candidates or to give more than one to some. Used in some school boards in nineteenth-century England. If everybody votes sincerely, it may be used to judge the intensity of voters' feelings about the candidates. But, as pointed out by C. L.
Dodgson
(Lewis Carroll ), it is very vulnerable to manipulation. If any voter is tempted to ‘plump’ for (give all his or her votes to) a favourite candidate to maximize that candidate's chances, then every rational voter must, and cumulative vote degenerates to
first-past-the-post
.

 
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(1401–64)
German theologian, philosopher, and voting theorist. Nicholas was born in Kues (Cusa) on the Moselle. He took a doctorate in canon law at Padua, and was ordained in 1426. In 1432 he was sent to the Council of Basle. This led him to favour the conciliar movement in the Church of his day. Reconciliation, unity, harmony, and concord were the principal concepts of his life and writings. The Council of Constance (1414–18) had brought the Great Schism to an end by deposing two rival popes and forcing a third to resign. This led Nicholas to think that the way to Christian unity lay in democratic rather than authoritarian rule. But he later came to believe that unity stood a better chance under one leader, the pope (apart from any scriptural claims to his supremacy). However, his papalism was not extreme. He never claimed the supremacy of the papal over secular power, not even the moderate Thomist ‘indirect power’.
Nicholas's ultimate notion of concordance and harmony (
coincidentia oppositorum
) is to be found especially in
De Docta Ignorantia
(On Learned Ignorance). Opposites coincide in God in whom there are degrees of attributes and no distinctions between them. How this is so is beyond our comprehension, yet since God is infinite it must be so.
Nicholas also wrote three treatises on mathematics. His mathematical bent led him to propose what is known nowadays as the
Borda
count (but which should perhaps be renamed the Cusanus count): that is, the rank-order method of voting. There is no evidence that any of his contemporaries understood the depth of his argument.
CB 

 
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