Tumult from within: State bureaucrats and Chinese mass movement, 1966--1971

The epic historical event known as the Cultural Revolution in China has long been an empirical ground for understanding communist institutions and mass conflict. This study uses a new source, County Annuals (xianzhi ), to analyze collective action and violence between 1966 and 1971. The attempt to contribute to the literature is threefold. First, it is the first systematic examination to date on the scale and mechanisms of the Cultural Revolution conflict in the countryside. Second, it challenges previous conceptions that characterize the mass movement as a rebellion against the status quo. Third, it specifies the role of state elites in collective action, a task rarely undertaken by most empirical works in the tradition of the polity model.; Because organizational resources were highly concentrated in the state sectors, citizens had to rely on a special type of mobilizing structures, the networks that extended from local state bureaucrats to the masses they governed. The mass movement then manifested itself as "movement from within." The investigation first explores the origins of the Cultural Revolution by documenting two historical processes in the state building in the prior years: perpetual mass campaigns as an occasion of bureaucratic demotion, and a J-curve like bureaucratic expansion. Both processes contributed to making one of many political campaigns become what we now know as the Cultural Revolution. This is followed by a series of analyses on events taking place in the three main stages of the Cultural Revolution. The first stage was characterized by mobilization by local leaders through state apparatuses, which set a path-dependent course for the later conflict. In the second stage, the masses split into two warring factions and fought deadly street battles on behalf of their patron bureaucrats. Mass factionalism is found to be class-based as well as patronage-based, and under certain conditions of one of them became predominant. The demobilization period, or the third stage, was plagued by extreme violence including large numbers of mass killing. The data analysis attributes the killings to the local bureaucrats who consolidated their power in the new government.