In November 1965, the play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was reviewed by Yao Wenyuan in the newspaper Wenhuibao. The review appeared a few years after the staging of the play, a spectacular opera in the Beijing style written by a respected historian of the Ming Dynasty, Wu Han. Later, it would come to be seen as the spark for the tumultuous events of the Cultural Revolution.

At the center of the play was Hai Rui, a real historical figure from the sixteenth century. Known for being an “incorruptible” imperial official, Hai always sided with the common peasants, risking his office to help them regain land that had been seized by the emperor’s corrupt officials. Despite his heroism, Hai was subjected to a public defamation campaign and dismissed by the emperor.

The play was didactic, intended to educate the audience about Chinese history. But according to Yao’s review, it also staged, in the relation between the upright Hai Rui and the adoring peasants who turned to him for salvation, the relation between the leadership of the Communist Party and the peasants who had constituted the base of the People’s War. Yao argued that the play was based on a historical misrepresentation: in portraying the peasants’ dependence on Hai, Wu Han had erased their political agency. The plot point of “returning the land,” meanwhile, was a way of esoterically criticizing the Communist leadership for the Great Leap Forward. The play was thus an instance of “the bourgeois opposition to the dictatorship of the proletariat and to the socialist revolution.”

The review was commissioned by Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao, who along with Yao and Wang Hongwen would constitute the “Gang of Four,” Mao Zedong’s radical inner circle that would, after Mao’s death, be arrested and blamed for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Precisely who in the Chinese revolutionary leadership Hai Rui and the “corrupt officials” were supposed to represent became a matter of central political import. Mao supported Yao’s essay, taking the literary analysis a step further by suggesting that Hai Rui was an allegorical defense of Peng Dehuai, who had publicly opposed Mao in a dispute that had peaked in 1959 at the Lushan Conference, with disastrous consequences. The Chairman had dismissed him.

Despite its endorsement by the highest leadership, however, the review was divisive. At some levels of the local state apparatus, there were initially attempts to censor its republication. Ultimately, the controversy led to the dismissal of Peng Zhen—Wu Han’s supporter and the mayor of Beijing—along with other cultural and political officials. Such would be a major thread of the Cultural Revolution: political disputes which went from debates over agricultural policy and theater criticism to the dismissal of public officials, and all the way round again.

The ensuing sequence of events is fairly well known: on May 25, 1966, there appeared a “big-character poster” at Peking University written by the appointed Party secretary of the philosophy department, Nie Yuanzi. The poster called on the campus to “Ignite the Cultural Revolution in the Universities,” by opposing the “counterrevolutionary revisionists” who were suppressing independent discussions—discussions partly provoked by the Hai Rui controversy. Rather than supporting his own party officials, who had been trying to keep political debate and activity under state control, Mao enthusiastically supported the poster, along with two others that followed at Tsinghua University Middle School, signed by a group that called itself the “Red Guards.” In doing so, he gave his blessing to the youth organizations that soon mushroomed into the major political actors of the Cultural Revolution.

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Over the years I have struggled to think through what strike me as two parallel problems. The first is a general historical condition I have come to see as “depoliticization,” which results from the closure of the revolutionary sequences of the twentieth century and the categories of political struggle that defined them. Depoliticization makes it difficult to imagine how, in our contemporary conditions, we could come up with the kinds of organizations and practices that would be capable of fundamentally transforming our society. The second was my own political experiences, in which initial energies of unity, organization and political creation turned, in a sinister reversal, into factions which sought to eat each other alive. Frequently, what began as opposition to society’s most entrenched institutions culminated in disputes over the expulsion of particular individuals.

My sense of novelty each time this happened, which paradoxically appears to be a historical invariant, was tempered somewhat by my awareness that purges and factionalism are classic problems of the left. Yet historically, they occurred in the context of global and civil wars, frequently following invasions and large-scale massacres. Why then did microscopic, parodical versions of these phenomena now take place even in the absence of such stakes?

As I went through these experiences, my thinking was stimulated by studying the Chinese Cultural Revolution, especially the unique analysis of the Italian sociologist Alessandro Russo, newly presented this year in his book Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture. In my ongoing reflections on the seeming impossibility of emancipatory politics in the present, I became fascinated by the category of “dismissal.” This term was used throughout Chinese history to refer to the removal of imperial officials from their positions, but its logic seemed to be reappearing in the entirely different context of contemporary social movements. For Russo, it was central to accounting for the contradictions of the Cultural Revolution, and also to his painstaking analysis of the Hai Rui affair—the revolution’s “theatrical prologue.”

Russo’s book comes at a time when comparisons to the Cultural Revolution abound. Pundits have used it to warn us of the dangerous implications of cancel culture—usually meaning, more or less, social media mobs, but also real-life ones, that target people who deviate from the dominant conformism, with the goal of ruining their reputations and sometimes getting them fired. In these comparisons, Maoism is equated with “social justice,” the Red Guards with students who try to take down their professors or activists who topple statues of the Founding Fathers, the famous “struggle sessions” with today’s ritualistic confessions of privilege.

Such comparisons may seem quite alarming, given that condemnations of the Cultural Revolution are based on some matters of indisputable fact. It included violent conflict between opposing factions, military repression of movements that fell out of favor and the denunciation and persecution of individuals whose ideological rectitude was insufficient. To refer to the examples circulating around Hai Rui, both the author Wu Han and the play’s alleged allegorical protagonist Peng Dehuai were heavily persecuted from the start of the Cultural Revolution, and died in prison.

It is easy to point out, and many have, that contemporary events come nowhere near the scale of violence and repression associated with the Cultural Revolution. Nevertheless, the exaggerated and ill-informed character of these comparisons—unencumbered by any awareness of the scholarly debate on this astonishingly complicated episode in the history of state socialism—does not necessarily invalidate what we might call their “rational kernel.” The history of the left is dripping with examples of groups fighting for human emancipation and liberation who became punitive and conformist. Social ostracism and unemployment are not the same as firing squads and gulags, but they are harmful nonetheless and, perhaps even more salient for those of us who remain committed to the projects of human emancipation, they are incompatible with those political goals.

Comparisons between the Cultural Revolution and our own time therefore present us with an opportunity to look more closely at the historical example and see what it really has to teach us. Indeed, as recent scholarship confirms, the Cultural Revolution was far more complicated than one-dimensional narratives about mindless mobs directed by Mao would suggest. For instance, Yiching Wu’s 2014 book The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, while quite critical of Mao and the Maoists, shows that, while the Cultural Revolution did display dynamics of containment and repression from above, it also “generated new forms of political subjectivity and solidarity.” From below, participants in the revolution heeded Mao’s call for rebellion, but they also responded to their own circumstances and pursued their own political goals. These included, as Wu writes, “the struggles of individuals who suffered political discrimination for equal citizenship, workers’ demands for better wages and work conditions, popular grievances against cadre abuses of power, and recalcitrant rebels’ opposition to mass demobilization and political recentralization.”

Such accounts raise questions that are more complicated than any hasty comparison can suggest. How did these contradictory tendencies coexist as part of a single political sequence? How do popular energies move in what appear to be irreconcilable directions? How do mass movements introject hierarchical structures of power? While the critique of centralist and top-down models of political organization has become familiar in recent years, less attention is paid to the way that people actually absorb such structures into their everyday lives. This is a problem that requires further investigation and intervention—though not in the moralistic sense that hierarchies are bad and should therefore be eliminated from group dynamics, an approach I have found to paradoxically encourage the policing of others.

The problem with the moralizing view is that it imagines that liberation is latent in human relations, waiting to express itself once the malign, artificial structures are removed. Such dreams of a pure and original structurelessness are tempting, but misguided. Human liberation requires actively building new structures that prevent domination and exploitation from reasserting themselves. Since we do not yet know what these structures will look like, we have to both seriously study past attempts to build them and open up the space for experimentation in the present. Examining the Cultural Revolution helps us to explore both the conditions of possibility for political experimentation, and also the dynamics that often shut it down.

Perhaps Dai Jinhua’s eloquent reflection on historical memory in After the Post-Cold War (2018) best explains the orientation we can take in the present toward past traumas, otherwise reduced to the “depoliticized narrative” of personal memory: “Only the imagination and promise of an alternative future allow historical and present suffering to emerge and speak,” Dai writes, “and only a nonteleological future vision can free history and time from the custody of power and violence.” Indeed, once we recognize the emancipatory and egalitarian dimensions of the Cultural Revolution, the problem becomes more difficult, not less. We now have to try to understand why collectivities advocating an emancipatory politics also engage in persecution of their own members, not only in our own contemporary experience but also in one of the most significant events in the history of revolutionary socialism.

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Following the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, the new party-state set about implementing a program of abolishing all class distinctions. This meant not only the dispossession of capitalists and landlords, but also an ongoing attempt to undermine the intellectual and managerial elite whose monopoly on knowledge preserved the division of manual and intellectual labor. A kind of “affirmative action” for those who came from underprivileged worker and peasant class backgrounds, including through university admissions, had been central to this program. Yet at the same time, this approach to “class leveling” gave rise to a new political elite: a bureaucracy of the party-state that served as the primary authority and represented the working class at the level of government.¹ 1. I have drawn on Joel Andreas’s Rise of the Red Engineers (2008) and Disenfranchised (2019) for insight into the changing class dynamics in recent Chinese history.

Mao worried about the counterrevolutionary potential of this new elite. The sterility of the Party bureaucracy, in his view, threatened to hold back China’s passage through the socialist transition into a fully classless society. The lifelong revolutionary continued to place his faith in perpetual mass mobilization rather than institutional stability. Among his most famous slogans, perhaps most closely associated with the Cultural Revolution, was first articulated in 1939, and placed the principle of rebellion at the core of Marxism:

There are innumerable principles of Marxism, but in the final analysis they can all be summed up in one sentence: “To rebel is justified.” For thousands of years everyone said, “Oppression is justified, exploitation is justified, rebellion is not justified.” From the time that Marxism appeared on the scene, this old judgment was turned upside down, and this is a great contribution. The principle was derived by the proletariat from its struggles, but Marx drew the conclusion. In accordance with this principle, there was then resistance, there was struggle, and socialism was realized.

On August 1, 1966, Mao would repeat the slogan in his letter to the Red Guards of Tsinghua University Middle School, the site of major developments in the coming two years. He added at the end: “Marx said: the proletariat must emancipate not only itself but all mankind. If it cannot emancipate all mankind, then the proletariat itself will not be able to achieve final emancipation. Will comrades please pay attention to this truth too.” He followed this letter with his own big-character poster, which shockingly called on the comrades to “Bombard the Headquarters” of their own (his own) Communist Party. But this was a preview of things to come: the Cultural Revolution would be defined by this antagonism of Mao and his allies—unified with rebellious groups amidst the masses—against Mao’s own Party bureaucracy.

Mao’s encouragement of rebellion in this period, even when it was directed against his own officials, was driven by what Russo emphasizes as a subterranean theme of Mao’s thought. Leading up to the Cultural Revolution, Mao was preoccupied by a historical anxiety that sat at odds with the classical orientation of revolutionary culture toward the inevitability of victory. It was instead the “probable defeat” that framed Mao’s thinking.

Already in a meeting on May 5, 1966 with the Deputy Secretary of the Albanian Workers’ Party, Mehmet Shehu, Mao colorfully acknowledged his aging: “My health is quite good but Marx will eventually invite me to visit him.” He posed the question of when “revisionism”—the classical Marxist-Leninist phrase for the abandonment of the revolutionary path—would take over China. The source of this revisionism, Mao said, would not result from the machinations of established enemies. Rather, “those who now support us will suddenly, as if by magic, become revisionists.” Mao speculated pessimistically that when his generation went off to join Marx, revisionism would prevail. It was thus time at this late stage of the revolutionary’s life to think seriously about the prospect of the “restoration of capitalism.”

“Putting this probability as the first to take place, we are a bit worried,” Mao admitted. “I too am sometimes distressed. To say that I do not think it so and do not feel anxiety would be false. However, I woke up, I called some friends to a meeting, we’ve discussed it a bit and are looking for a solution.” A little over a week later would appear the famous Circular of 16 May, which invoked the Hai Rui affair and declared that “it is necessary … to criticize and repudiate those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and all spheres of culture.”

There is nothing surprising about this. In the modern world capitalism is the rule, and socialism the exception. It therefore requires constant renewal and reinvention by mass experiments. And if the bourgeoisie is inside the Communist Party, this means that organizational forms independent of the Party will be required to combat it. Situating the critique of revisionism in the probable defeat shows how Mao was engaged in a fundamental rethinking of the historical teleologies of revolutionary culture, a profound problem of lasting relevance. No wonder, Russo notes, that in meetings with Albanian comrades Mao continued to emphasize this theme, saying in 1967: “There are two possibilities: revisionism will overthrow us or we will overthrow revisionism.” Putting defeat as the “first possibility,” Mao said, was “beneficial,” since it would allow them not to “underestimate the enemy.” At another meeting a few months later, he expanded this point: “Most probably revisionism will win out, and we will be defeated. Through the probable defeat, we will arouse everyone’s attention.”

For Mao, then, intra-elite conflict was desirable insofar as it was necessary to remove the bureaucrats who were suppressing mass rebellion, since it was only mass rebellion that could avert the possible victory of capitalism in China—which has indeed been the eventual outcome. As Russo emphasizes, Mao’s participation in the debate over Yao’s review was motivated by his assessment of the risk of the rolling back of the achievements of the revolution, and was thus aimed chiefly at those in the ideological apparatus whom he believed threatened the free and open criticism of revisionism. “Mao’s statements in these months,” Russo writes, “can be summed up as focusing on two pressing themes: it was necessary to dismiss certain authorities and open to an unlimited plurality of political voices in China.” The relation between the two terms in this analysis, dismissal and pluralization, is decisive, and not only for understanding the Cultural Revolution. It is also central to grasping the fundamental problems of emancipatory politics in our own time.

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Dismissal, as manifested in the Hai Rui affair, involved the expulsion of ministers, leaders and politicians from their posts. But it also represented something much broader. “Dismissal,” Russo explains, is the repetitive procedure “that is omnipresent in every course of action that results in overthrowing, more or less violently, those who govern the life of others from their positions of authority at every level.” It is thus fundamentally a kind of governmental practice which increases in violence as it climbs to higher levels of authority. It revolves around the sensibility of the politician, which evinces, in Russo’s words, an “enjoyment of deciding the fate of others.”

Dismissal, Russo argues, is the rule in history. But there are also exceptions. The “egalitarian exception” is “pluralization,” a process that takes a distance from the existing social hierarchies and the practices of government. In exceptional moments of pluralization we see that “those who are usually in the position of being governed … are at times capable of self-organizing their political existence and inventing egalitarian forms of relations.” Concretely, pluralization in the Cultural Revolution meant the appearance of entirely new organizations independent of and indeed antagonistic to the party-state, spreading far beyond university campuses and extending to the urban working class.

It should be emphasized that, in identifying the emancipatory character of this moment of pluralization, Russo does not seek to rationalize the spectacular performances that are now associated with the Cultural Revolution—and that motivate most contemporary comparisons. Destroying statues and buildings, renaming streets and shops, were a distraction from the real issues: the formation of a plurality of independent organizations without the prior authorization of the single party-state. These spectacular practices, in fact, were to the benefit of the Party bureaucracy insofar as they redirected student activism away from pluralization.

The dilemma of the Cultural Revolution was played out in the overlapping of dismissal and pluralization. As we have seen, the governmental practice of dismissal was initially supposed to open up the space for pluralization, by removing the bureaucrats and revisionists who, raised to positions of power in the early stages of the Revolution, now sought to clamp down on rebellion outside the Party. Mao thought—mistakenly—that the two processes were compatible. But the experience of the Cultural Revolution illustrates that there is in fact a fundamental discontinuity and antagonism between the process of dismissal, which depends on hierarchies in which people occupy particular social positions, and egalitarian invention, which makes equality a living principle through experimentation with organizational forms. In this case, the thousands of new organizations that emerged through pluralization eventually came to attack each other, and the egalitarian experiment self-destructed.

The phenomenon that emerges from the amalgamation of dismissal and pluralization is “factionalism,” and for Russo it indicates the fundamental limit of the Cultural Revolution. Factionalism describes the process by which, through arbitrary splits and alliances, the indeterminate plurality of organizations was reduced to a framework of two. The self-authorization of organizations was no longer at stake; now the factions would confront each other in fighting directed toward political or military supremacy. Instead of maintaining independence from the party-state, the factional organizations sought to become the nucleus of a new party-state, constituted by the process of dismissal and annihilation of the opposing faction. The Cultural Revolution had devolved into “grotesque brawls” between youths, whose struggle for power soon led to the exhaustion of the political energies that had only recently come into being.

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