The Origins of « Status Politics »: Family clans and Factions in CCP's Top Leadership During the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976

Xiaohong Xiao-Planes (1)

1 IFRAE - Institut français de recherche sur l’Asie de l’Est

In a bid to successfully draw his grand blueprint for an anti-capitalist anti-revisionist regime, Mao Zedong smashed the Yan'an Round Table-the power structure established during the Seventh National Congress of CCP, approved the military circle led by Lin Biao and the radical civilian circle led by Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng, and launched a brand-new revolution that struck the Party bureaucracy of the time. Yet it was not enough for these circles to act as an instrument of the Revolution. They preferred growing their family clans' power and their factions' influences in order to scramble for the supreme power. The exclusionism and the cruelty of factionalism compelled the diminished ones as well as their families to put all their faction's resources to use, thus swept up into a desperate struggle. The power structure of the PRC's top leadership during the Cultural Revolution was characterized by the numerous family clans and factions, a phenomenon that was in great contrast to CCP's conventional system and to the objective proclaimed by the Revolution: fighting against capitalist roaders. The resulting "Status Politics" seriously affected the proper functioning of public power, which led to abuses of power, inequitable distribution of resources, and distorted standard of values.

Domaines: Histoire; Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Xiaohong Xiao-Planes. The Origins of « Status Politics »: Family clans and Factions in CCP's Top Leadership During the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976. 2000. ⟨hal-04109179⟩