purge those officials suspected of oppositionist tendencies. The members of these Maoist groups were partly selected from within the committees and partly sent out from headquarters in Peking.

This attempt at a Maoist takeover within the party, based on nothing but Mao's claim to ideological infallibility, did not, however, carry sufficient weight to dislodge the entrenched party opposition. It therefore had to be supplemented by Mao's group with a resort to outside force, namely, the

army.

Under the leadership of Lin Piao, the PLA has in recent years become Mao's main support. The 1959 purge of its leaders was far-reaching, encompassing not only P'eng Teh-huai and Huang K'o cheng but also the Army Inspector-General (Hsiao K'o), the head of the Political Department (Tang Cheng), the head of the rear services department (Huang Hsueh-chih), and over forty other leading military men. Further purges have since taken an additional toll of high-ranking army officers.21

20

Since the early 1960's, the purged army has been held up as an example of revolutionary virtue for the entire nation to emulate. Mao himself proclaimed at a Central Committee meeting in 1962 that the PLA should serve as the model for cultivating the correct spirit of the revolution, and since early 1964 the party press and official statements have repeatedly emphasized that “the whole country must learn from the People's Liberation Army." 22 This campaign was soon followed by concrete steps to extend military control. At the end of 1964 army officers were placed in political departments, in government ministries, in communications, in industries, in the People's Bank, and in educational institutions, for the avowed purpose of spreading the spirit of the PLA. Thus the army gained a strong foothold in crucial departments and agencies, to be used later in the battle for power.

The revolutionary spirit in the army itself was strengthened by the regulations of May 1965, which abolished titles and insignia of rank for officers. In the same year, according to an official announcement, "hundreds of thousands of distinguished recruits and basic-level cadres of the PLA were ad

20 For a partial listing of those purged, see Fei Ch'ing Yen Chiu (Taipei), July 31, 1966, pp. 32 ff.

21 Early this year Japanese press correspondents in Peking reported the appearance of wall posters attacking two of Communist China's most distinguished military figures-Marshals Ho Lung and Chu Teh-for having "plotted" against Mao. See The Evening Star (Washington, D. C.), Jan. 21, 1967, and The Washington Post, Jan. 20, 1967, p. 1.

22 E.g., Jen-min Jih-pao editorial, Feb. 1, 1964; Jen-min Shou Tse, pp. 522-47.

mitted into the party," and by the end of 1965 one-third of all army personnel were party members. In the army itself, the study of "Mao's thought" and indoctrination against "revisionism" continued to receive high priority. In SeptemberOctober 1965, young men recently "retired" from the army made their appearance in educational institutions. Of proper small-peasant origin, they enrolled as students, often with doubtful qualifications, and at the same time received minor jobs in the school administrations. These young students of army background later emerged as leaders of the student "work groups" which last summer established Red Guard units in educational institutions throughout the country."

In spite of these careful preparations, the first of the work groups, established on the Peking University campus on May 23, 1966, appears to have been a plant of the opposition and reportedly had to be removed through the personal intervention of Ch'en Po-ta, Chiang Ch'ing, and Chou En-lai. Only after the elimination of this false work group did the proper organizers establish a reliable Maoist student group which, on a signal from Radio Peking on June 2, attacked the president of the university and then went on to assail the Mayor of Peking and head of the Peking party committee, P'eng Chen, the first top-ranking Communist leader to fall victim to Mao's drive.25

Before moving on from the initial purges of P'eng Chen, Lu Ting-yi and others to a general offensive to regain mastery of the entire CCP organization, Mao and his supporters seem to have felt that some formal party acceptance of the program of the Cultural Revolution was necessary. For this purpose the Central Committee was called into plenary session from August 1 to 12, 1966, and the events of the meeting provided further proof of the battle within the party. Of the full Central Committee membership, only 80 were present (47 regular members and 33 candidate members), with 101 absent (44 regular and 57 candidate members); and some of those attending seem to have been newly appointed by Mao's group without proper procedure. After eight days of deliberation, the Committee adopted a 16-point resolution outlining the further prosecution of the Cultural Revolution. From the officially published text of the resolution,

23 NCNA report from Peking, Jan. 1, 1966.

24 Information furnished the author by foreign educators who recently left Communist China after teaching in Chinese institutions.

25 Same source as above.

ciples following a period of relative decline or indifference." The three critical conditions of a revival, then, are religiousness, relative decline, and a desire for restoration. In the preceding pages, we have dealt at some length with the latter two elements. In order to complete the circle and establish the relevance of the revivalist metaphor to the present inquiry, it is now necessary to turn to the concept of religiousness itself.

Parallels between communism and religion have frequently been drawn, and it has become commonplace to refer to Marxism-Leninism (-StalinismMaoism) as a "secular religion" or "political religion." This convention rests on the (often unarticulated) assumption that all fundamentalist ideologies, whether transcendental or humanistic in perspective, may be treated as "value-oriented beliefs" and hence as functional equivalents-so long as they envision a regeneration of self and society and provide a comprehensive hierarchy of values and behavioral norms.

A recently published study in the field of the sociology of religion employs the term "valueorientation" to denote those special kinds of all encompassing perspectives which make an absolute claim upon the allegiance of all who partake of their vision of reality.38 In a similar vein, the author of a major work on the theory of collective behavior argues that all value-oriented beliefs have in common a preoccupation with the moral bases of social life and an overriding concern with nature, man's place in nature, and man's relation to man. 39 In this sense, then, the Communist Weltanschauung would seem to fall within the same category of beliefs as the other great cosmic doctrines of history, both religious and secular.

Sects and Secularization

But there is an even more immediate sense in which the religious metaphor is appropriate to the present analysis, and this relates to the propensity

of value-oriented movements to become routinized

over time. In this connection, students of religious

• yenon style

37 See, e.g., Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, New York, Norton, 1962; Jules Monnerot, Sociology and Psychology of Communism, Boston, Beacon Press, 1960; and David E. Apter, The Politics of Modernization, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1965.

38 Charles Y. Glock and Rodney Stark, Religion and Society in Tension, Chicago, Rand McNally, 1965, p. 9.

39 Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, New York, Free Press, 1963, pp. 120-22.

organization have frequently noted the near-universal tendency for protest-oriented sects to evolve into establishment-oriented denominations.

Sects, which are the characteristic organizational form of value-oriented movements in their initial, enthusiastic stage, are identified by the following traits: They are voluntary associations, and membership is by proof to sect authorities of some claim to personal merit-such as knowledge of doctrine or affirmation of a conversion experience. Their self-conception is one of an elect, a gathered remnant, possessing special enlightenment. Exclusiveness is emphasized, and sects are usually organized around a charismatic leader to whom is attributed a "gift of grace," and from whom the inner circle of disciples receive spiritual inspiration. The disciples, in turn, are expected to live austere lives, shunning worldly possessions and material perquisites. And finally, sects accept, at least as an ideal, the egalitarian priesthood of all true believers.40

For a variety of reasons, some of which have already been mentioned in another context, fundamentalist sects are seldom able to maintain their original values and their pristine character in the face of changing external or internal social conditions. As the sect begins to encounter the exigencies of sustaining itself over long periods of time, it gradually loses its exclusiveness and egalitarian character and increasingly displays the characteristic traits of an established church, or denomination. It begins to employ formalized procedures of entry; breadth and tolerance are emphasized. Its selfconception becomes unclear, and its doctrinal position unstressed. It begins to accept the standards. and values of the prevailing culture. A hierarchically organized, professional priesthood arises. Personal charisma is attenuated and progressively replaced by the "charisma of office." The evangelism of the outsider declines; denominational services become formalized, and spontaneity disappears. Finally, individual commitment grows weaker as the intimate community of believers evolves into an impersonal society of members.“

The obvious point to be made here is that many of the major elements of the Chinese Communist Party's "Yenan style" of social organization and leadership correspond rather closely to the domi

40 Adapted from Bryan R. Wilson, "An Analysis of Sect Development," American Sociological Review, Vol. XXIV, Feb. ruary 1959, pp. 13-15. A similar list of attributes appears in the pioneering work of Joachim Wach, Sociology of Religion, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1944, pp. 196 ff. 41 Wilson, loc cit.

_nant ethical imperatives of the sectarian Gemeinschaft, while the organizational and leadership principles of the CPSU bear more than a superficial resemblance to the ethos of the denominational Gesellschaft. Moreover, the various factors which tend to cause sects to evolve into denominations are of precisely the same etiological order as the factors which we have identified as being among the major sources of revisionism-i.e., the internal differentiation, bureaucratization, and professionalization of the apparat; the ritual sterilization of doctrinal prescriptions; and the gradual acculturation of the movement to prevalent external norms and values. Herein, then, lies one possible key to understand ing the phenomenon of ideological revivalism in Communist China. For if our analogy is at all relevant, the CCP now stands at the threshold of denominationalism. Its pristine sectarian values have already begun to suffer dilution from the "corrupting" influences of its secular environment; the party itself has become increasingly bureaucratized and differentiated; and its charismatic appeal and sense of mission have faded along with memories of its past revolutionary heroics.

With the example of Soviet revisionism confronting them as an augury of the future, the Chinese Communists have,' in the past three years, been engaged in a desperate race against time, a frantic struggle to "sectarianize" the society before the society can "denominationalize" the party. And what lends this sectarian revival an even greater sense of urgency is the fact that the process of routinization coincides with the historical epoch of the "changing of the guard"-the period of declining health and activity of the charismatic founder and the maturation of a second generation of "professional" clerics."2

The Road Ahead

The People's Republic of China, barely seventeen and a half years old, now faces squarely the universal crisis of adolescence: the crisis of identity. The twin forces of modernization and denominationalism seem destined to attenuate many of the more radical tenets of the Maoist faith. The social structure of the Chinese nation likewise seems destined to evolve further in the direction of bureaucratic professionalism, secularism, and instrumental

rationality ideological revivalism notwithstanding. It is a primary axiom of cultural anthropology that when the behavior enjoined by ideal valuepatterns departs too radically from that which is suitable under actual socio-economic conditions, the value-patterns themselves will change. There is no small irony in this, for it is the very success of the Chinese Communists in overcoming the inherited conditions of economic backwardness and social disintegration that spells the ultimate doom of the party's "Yenan spirit" as an operational ethos. It has rightly been observed that “what they [the Chinese Communists] call 'revisionism' is here to stay, for it is the essence of the industrial society they have sought to mold." *3

The CCP has, in the past, demonstrated a remarkable ability to assess pragmatically its successes and failures and to alter its policies accordingly. This is one of the built-in advantages of Mao's dialectical conception of society, which views everything in terms of the fluid interplay of contradictory principles. If today the party leadership chooses to emphasize one particular social contradiction (e.g., the contradiction between “red” and “expert”), and to give major stress to one particular aspect of this contradiction (e.g., "red"), then certain strains and imbalances are likely to arise as indeed they have arisen. But such strains and imbalances can beand have been in the past-reduced by a subsequent shift of policy in the direction of the golden mean. Hence, what appears in the short run to be a fanatical and irrational outburst of political and ideological violence may in the long run appear as merely a single episode in the pendulum-like dialectic of social development. Assuming that Mao and his colleagues are not utterly mad, we may thus anticipate that the present tense mood of revivalism will likely be followed by a relatively calm period of reassessment and readjustment.

But to what extent can this developmental dialectic continue to operate on the fundamental sociological assumptions provided by "the thought of Mao Tse-tung"? To what extent is the Maoist vision of the "good" society reconcilable with the structural and normative imperatives of the "modern" society? The thrust of our analysis has been that there remain a great many unresolved (if not unresolvable) contradictions between the two. Mao is undoubtedly correct in anticipating troubled times for the second generation of leadership in Communist China.

42 On the subject of succession crises faced by charismatic sects upon the death of the founder, see Wach, op. cit., pp. 137-41.

43 Lewis, op. cit., p. 146.

By Franz Michael

W

hat is going on in China today is clearly a power struggle between the rival exponents of what are in essence two divergent Communist lines: one representing a pragmatic, rational communism moving forward or retreating within the confines of stages of development as hitherto understood by most Communist leaderships; the other, Mao's radical, utopian communism, which preaches the attainment of the same Communist goals by means. of a short cut replacing economic and political rationality with blind belief in doctrine and reliance on force and the power of human will. This battle for supremacy began in 1958 when Mao Tse-tung abandoned all previously accepted principles of Communist development and started the "Great Leap Forward" as an all-out effort to achieve China's rapid advance toward communism. Manpower, organization and whipped-up enthusiasm were to take the place of normal methods of

Dr. Michael is Associate Director and Chairman of the Research Colloquium on Modern China, Institute for Sino-Soviet Studies, George Washington University (Wash., D.C.), and author of, among others, The Origin of Manchu Rule in China (New York, Octagon Press, 1965). He recently returned from an extended tour of the Far East where he interviewed numerous persons, including ex-CCP officials, with firsthand knowledge of current developments in Communist China.

economic development and create the increase in production necessary for the transition to the ultimate Communist social order. Communal living and distribution of goods were to initiate this transformation.

This departure from previous Communist practice was designed as much to advance China's position within the Communist world as to speed up the revolution at home. After the death of Stalin, Mao had aspired to a share in the leadership of world communism but had been snubbed by Khrushchev on the premise that Soviet superiority in development entitled the USSR to supreme leadership. Only a dramatic achievement at home could provide Mao with a solid base from which to speak back. The "Great Leap Forward" and the commune system of 1958 were thus designed not only to accomplish the rapid communization of China, but also, in the fantastic Chinese boasts of the time, to enable her to "bypass the Soviet Union on the way to communism."

We know today that this double-edged attack was virtually the product of Mao's own lone-handed scheming, and that it was forced upon a reluctant and to some extent divided Chinese Communist party leadership. In three meetings called between December 1957 and March 1958 at Hangchow, Nanning and Chengtu, Mao had informed a group of party leaders of his plans for the "Great Leap Forward," adding at the third meeting the proposal