Revolutionary Committees
Chapter 6 recounts what happened after Mao, unwilling to allow the establishment of permanent autonomous organizations, called for factories to be governed by new “revolutionary committees,” that included veteran cadres and rebel leaders, as well as military officers assigned to oversee this volatile combination. Rebel leaders were supposed to serve as “mass representatives,” but after their organizations were disbanded, they lost the political base that had given them autonomous power and were no longer accountable to their constituencies. With the masses sidelined, the subsequent factional contention between “new” and “old” cadres hardly served as effective mass supervision. Moreover, this institutionalized form of contention was entirely dependent on Mao’s personal authority and was dismantled with the purge of the radical faction that followed his death in 1976. For all their destructive power, the political experiments of this period failed to do much to make leaders more accountable to those below them.