‘The revolution will not be televised’: the institutional work of radical change in China’s Cultural Revolution

Abstract

Mao Zedong sought both to destabilize existing institutional categories for ordering meaning, and impose new ones, initially through the Great Leap Forward and subsequently during the Cultural Revolution. The paper explores the institutional work that made this process of radical change possible. At its core was the construction and deployment of a set of binary categorization devices. These are explored in the paper to argue that persistent and morally sophisticated institutional work is necessary to make radical change possible. Macro, meso and micro processes of institutional work operate in parallel, reinforcing each other and articulating utopian desire with local possibility. There is no single revolutionary event, no central scene to be represented. Together, leaders and followers at several levels participate in the processes of categorizing and managing the result of such categorizations. Categorizations of radical change have explicitly stigmatizing purposes and managing categorization/stigmatization is an important institutional work, instrumental for radical change.

Keywords:

• Cultural Revolution
• cult of personality
• Mao Zedong
• institutional work
• categorization

Notes

The title comes from the rap pioneer, Gil Scott-Heron (1970): in his usage the stress is on the necessity of changing everyday patterns – if revolutionary change is to occur, changes that are beneath the threshold of dramatic events but are deep processes of change must occur – much as Cultural Revolution sought to be.

1. It should be noted that at the time that this occurred, particularly bold Chinese cadres from the Academy of the Social Sciences, when travelling overseas, as they started to do increasingly after 1976, would often, in conversation, refer to the Gang of Four, whilst holding the fingers and thumb of one hand outstretched – a subtle way of referring to Mao’s inclusion in the ‘Gang’.

2. The central idea behind the Great Leap Forward was that rapid development of China’s agricultural and industrial sectors should take place in parallel. Industrialization would occur through the use of the one resource China had in plentiful and cheap supply: human labour power. Huge ‘People’s Communes’ were formed as peasant villages were consolidated into collective enterprises. By the end of 1958, approximately 25,000 communes had been set-up, each with an average of 5000 households. Each commune was encouraged to set-up a system of steel production that was local, decentralized and based on locally made backyard furnaces that were to be fed through scrap metal. Additionally, labour was diverted into major construction projects, digging dams and reservoirs with picks, shovels and buckets. As fuel for the furnaces, local reserves of timber were used.

3. Echoes were heard in the West: students at European universities such as the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics were staging sit-ins and protesting against the university authorities in a series of televisual events that were often marked by use of The Little Red Book as a prop. Usually, it was held aloft and shaken vigorously in the general direction of whatever was constituted as the authorities.

4. In Nazi Germany, for example, there is evidence of military officers giving explicit orders to their men not to participate in executions because that was not proper soldierly behaviour (Kershaw 2000), but as the Final Solution gained formal approval, this type of order became impossible to issue. At this stage, the out-group is already perceived by the perpetrators as less than human and as the cause of its own disgrace.