The Cultural Revolution and the Army

Abstract

Addressing political cadres of the Chinese Communist in Yenan on November 6, 1938, Mao Tse-tung said: has always been our principle that the party must control the gun, and that the gun shall never be allowed to control the party. In this article it will be proposed that domestic political developments in the Chinese People's Republic during the last two years may have resulted in a thoroughgoing reversal of this principle. For students of Chinese politics, the thesis that Communist China has fallen under more or less unconcealed military rule is already something of a truism. However, we must ask how this basic change in leadership conditions came about, and whether there is really sufficient evidence to uphold the theory of the gun controlling the party on the Chinese mainland today. Furthermore, we must ask whether military rule, if there really is any, tends toward an overwhelming influence of the central military authorities, or whether it shows indications instead of military regionalism, a feature which was so common in China between 1850 and the late 1940s. Without doubt the PLF (Chinese People's Liberation Forces, and Forces rather than Army is the more accurate translation of the Chinese term chun) generates enough strength to be a formidable factor of control during times of domestic crisis. It is precisely this that has made itself felt during the past two years. Ever since Lin Piao took over the command of the PLF as minister of national defense in September 1959, he has spared no effort to make the PLF an entirely reliable instrument of party rule over the Chinese mainland. In the beginning this was no easy task. The consequences of the economic crisis that followed the establishment of people's communes in 1958 began to be felt in the PLF in the winter of 1959-60. Discontent spread in the rank and file, and a number of documents reveal that a substantial number of counterrevolutionary trends developed within the army.' Lin Piao and his then trusted adviser, Hsiao Hua (who took over the leadership of the General Political Department, with a direct chain of command reaching down to the squad-level political commissars) went out to regenerate ideological purity and reliability among the Chinese military. From 1961 through 1965, successive indoctrination campaigns were di-