Capitalist Roaders Research Articles

Capitalist roaders or socialist reformers? A critical review of Marxist literature on China since 1976

Marx identified a transitional phase between capitalism and communism in which society is transformed under a Revolutionary Dictatorship, but still retains aspects of the capitalist society from which it was born. Socialist construction then, is not only the process of developing the productive forces and transforming the relations of production. It is also a process of continued ideological and class struggle against remaining capitalist elements within society. This is both a struggle against the resurgence of capitalist relations within the economic base, as well as a project of societal transformation. Much of the debate over China's economy rests on the nature of the 1978 Reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping. Marxists debate whether these Reforms represent a break with the project of socialist construction in China or a development of this process. This paper will critically review the scholarship on the question of socialist construction in China before and after the Reforms, reviewing works by Deng Xiaoping, Domenico Losurdo, Charles Bettelheim , William Hinton, Pao-Yu Ching, Minqi Li, and Zhun Xu.

Research on the Transformation of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction

Research on the Transformation of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction

Review: Useful but flawed survey of media role in bleak political landscape

Review of: Politics and the Media, edited by Babak Bahador, Geoff Kemp, Kate McMillan and Chris Rudd. Auckland: Pearson, 2013. ISBN 978144255826A generaton after the capitalist roaders took over the New Zealand Labour Party, the country’s political landscape is bleak. As described in this new book, it is one in which no political party is interested in any ideology except staying in power, no party will do anything that might offend a focus group, PR hacks control policy, political party membership has all but disappeared, the public is almost totally disengaged and most of the media has neither the time, the skill nor the inclination to cover politics.

The Pragmatic Challenge to Indian Foreign Policy

A subversive pragmatic vision is increasingly challenging some of the key foundations of India’s traditional nationalist and left-of-center foreign policy, diluting the consensus that shaped the policy, and raising new possibilities especially for India’s relations with the United States and global nuclear arms control. This debate between two centrist foreign policy perspectives is not yet settled. The two are described here as ‘‘traditional nationalist’’ and ‘‘pragmatist,’’ with the former representing the established and dominant perspective, and the latter as the emerging challenger. 1 Actual Indian policy mostly splits the difference, mouthing traditional nationalist (hereafter referred to as simply nationalist) slogans while following pragmatist prescriptions. One major result has been the widening of political space for closer relations with the United States, even without a stable consensus. These taxonomies are ideal types: it is very unlikely that those characterized as either nationalist or pragmatist would agree with or accept every tenet of these categories. The categorizations are designed to provide an outline of the competing lines of argumentation about Indian foreign policy, rather than identify nationalists or pragmatists per se. It also is important to note that it is difficult right now in India to associate these perspectives with particular political parties, think tanks, or ministries. Thus, these perspectives are individualistic and do not correspond to particular organizations. They do, however, represent the views of important public intellectuals, policy analysts, academics, journalists, diplomats, and government officials.

Mao's Legacy Revisited: Its Lasting Impact on China and Post‐Mao Era Reform

Most observers hold a positive view of China's reform since 1978 but are critical of the policies of the era of Mao Zedong, ignoring the inseparable connections between the two. This article argues that the post‐Mao era reform represents both continuity and discontinuity with the immediate past, and a complex mingling of Mao's legacy with new initiatives. The origins of many reform policies, as well as their accomplishments, could be traced back to the Mao era. They were often conditioned by, benefited from, or were built upon the outcomes of Mao's policies. These included the decisions to normalize China's relations with the United States and develop friendship with Third World countries, efforts to decentralize economic power and industrialize China without urbanization, and the move to defeat “capitalist roaders” but call Deng Xiaoping back to office. Overall, the turn toward capitalism of China has proven Mao's foresight, validated his concerns, and may be evidence of the lasting utility of Maoism.

A Critical Introduction to Mao (review)

Reviewed by: A Critical Introduction to Mao Jing Li (bio) Timothy Cheek, editor. A Critical Introduction to Mao New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xxi, 392 pp. Paperback, $27.99. ISBN 978-0-521-71154-8. When the Great Cultural Revolution started in 1966, Bo Xilai, eighteen years old at the time, eagerly joined the rebellion as a leading Red Guard. As it happened, Chairman Mao’s revolution-within-a-revolution did not work out too well for Bo personally, whose father, a veteran Communist and vice premier of the People’s Republic of China, came to be persecuted as a “capitalist roader.” Labeled the son of a chief class enemy, Bo Xilai sat through reform study sessions and toiled quietly at a factory for much of a decade. The experience, however, did not destroy Bo Xilai’s admiration for Mao. While serving as the CCP party boss in charge of Chongqing, the largest city in Southwest China, Bo made quite a name for himself by promoting many of Mao’s ideas, countering the market-oriented liberal reform in the post-Mao era. In particular, the so-called Red Song movement that Bo launched, in which large numbers of Chinese gathered to sing the praises of Mao, the Communist Party, and socialist China, caught on in Chongqing and in other parts of the country. Bo created such a stir with his Neo-Maoist platform that Henry Kissinger, who likes to ingratiate himself with China’s top leaders and rising political stars, made a trip to Chongqing, where he attended a Red Song chorus with tens of thousands of singers. The recent removal of Bo from his post in Chongqing, under mysterious circumstances, has generated much anger and agony across the country, which testifies to his popularity among China’s new left. So, thirty-five years after his physical demise, Mao lives on and serves as a key link between history and contemporary China. These two incarnations of Mao — the historical figure and his legacy in the present world — are the subjects addressed in A Critical Introduction to Mao, a collection of essays edited by Timothy Cheek. As Cheek notes in the preface to the volume, “The book . . . [End Page 39] seeks to present the historical Mao and explicitly juxtaposes that Mao with the very significant but importantly ahistorical Maos that so deeply concern millions of people across the globe today” (p. xi). Penned by leading scholars on Mao and modern China, the essays collected in this volume cover Mao in various historical stages and multiple aspects of his personality and policies. Together, the experts tell a story of Mao and his legacy that is rich, complex, and thought-provoking, which effectively dispels simplistic notions about Mao that are still widespread in the West and China itself. In their presentation of facts and ideas, the authors draw from both primary sources and secondary literature, including many that became available in recent times, which make their writings up-to-date and substantial. This enables readers, as authors have intended it, to learn not only what we know about Mao but also how we get to know what we know (p. xii). The book also provides an annotated list of additional readings, which comes in handy for those who want to explore the covered subject further. A Critical Introduction to Mao contains a total of fourteen articles. Timothy Cheek leads off with an essay that highlights major themes inspected in the book. Joseph Esherick follows with an overview of Mao’s revolution in the larger context of twentieth-century China. Seven other experts then examine Mao chronologically and topically. Brantly Womack covers Mao from the 1920s to 1937, focusing on Mao’s transition from an urban radical to a rural revolutionary, a key development that secured Mao’s position as the top Chinese Communist leader. Hans van de Ven considers events in the period from 1937 to 1956, which features tension between Mao’s sinicization of Marxism and his search for modernity. Michael Schoenhals completes the chronological coverage with what he terms “consuming fragments” of Mao in the chairman’s last twenty years. The grouping of the years from 1937 to 1956 as...

Uniformed Rebellion, Fabricated Identity: A Study of Social History of Red Guards in Military Uniforms during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Beyond

This case study investigates, from the perspectives of politics, ideology, social psychology, and culture, the many layered meanings interwoven into the quasi-uniform that Chinese Red Guards invented and donned during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), one of the biggest political tragedies of the twentieth century. The Red Guards were inspired and encouraged by Mao Zedong and a few of his cohorts, and were essentially self-invented urban adolescents with various social backgrounds and political motivations. The Red Guard's attire that took form by mixing some parts of the uniform of the People's Liberation Army—grass-green jacket, soft cloth cap with red star insignia, belt with a broad metallic buckle, and the self-made red armband—served as a crucial means of inventing and shaping their group identity and their ideological pursuits. Politically, their attire signaled the Red Guards’ support of Mao in his war against the “capitalist roaders.” Ideologically, it symbolized the Red Guard community's favor of utopian, egalitarian, socialist ideals exemplified by the army; socio-psychologically, the quasi-uniform was a trope of those young rebels’ repressed cravings for authority through imitation. Culturally, this set of sartorial signs simultaneously figured many submerging desires for heroism and pleasure seeking, hero worship and self-fulfillment, collective narcissism and revolutionary romanticism. By retracing and reconstructing historically nuanced messages that are interwoven into the quasi-uniform of the Red Guards, this study helps us to understand the unique role that clothing plays in forging a mass political identity and movement.

Linguistic Engineering: Language and Politics in Mao's China. By JI FENGYUAN. [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004. 351 pp. $50.00. ISBN 0-8248-2536-5.

Can the nightmare of language control in Orwell's 1984 work in reality? Linguistic Engineering offers a detailed look at Cultural Revolution slogans and draconian punishments for ‘incorrect’ speech, especially in schools and the workplace. Ji offers much-needed evidence from linguistics and psychology that, even for Red Guards, new vocabulary for ‘class struggle’ against ‘cow ghosts and snake gods’ could not produce a complete or permanent change in thought. Language control is fortunately impossible, however much intellectuals or propagandists may wish. Mere exposure to a phrase does not mean people will learn it, much less believe it. Humans inevitably interpret the world by experience, context and possible rewards, using humour, subversion, indifference, and simple daily routine to find ways to live around even the most oppressive propaganda.Linguistic Engineering focuses mainly on the spoken language of political discussion groups and propaganda between 1966 and 1972, with additional examples from school textbooks, and some model literature and operas. Once labels like ‘rightist,’ ‘bad element’ or ‘capitalist roader’ became linked with everything from ostracism to job loss to prison, passionate battles erupted. Traditional four character phrases such as “confess without being pressed” (bu da zi zhao) grew heavily politicized. Other new vocabulary, however, such as ‘tractor’ or ‘work unit’ was a more benign reflection of new technology and social systems, and remains part of everyday life.Lazy research mars what should have been a better book. Most of the Chinese examples are lifted from English language secondary sources by political scientists, then back-translated (well) into Chinese. Other examples come from English language memoirs of former Red Guards. They are rather unevenly chosen and cited, but most examples have already received meticulous discussion over the past 30 years. This book uses the term ‘Maoist worship,’ for example, very simplistically, ignoring the extensive literature on the distinctions between religious rites and political rallies. The term ‘linguistic engineering’ itself, comes not from Stalin, but from his propagandist, Zhadnov, who said writers are “engineers of human souls.” Other sections are original, but less compelling (e.g. the heroine of the model opera, “On the Docks,” gets 42 per cent of the dialogue).

China Dawn: The Story of a Technology and Business Revolution

China Dawn: The Story of a Technology and Business Revolution

The Origins of the Cultural Revolution . Volume 3, The Coming of the Cataclysm, 1961-1966 (review)

Reviews 197© 1999 by University ofHawai'i Press Although Liu and Ma emphasize the role ofthe national college entrance exam in setting and maintaining high curriculum standards and student achievement, they keep coming back to the overriding effect ofchanges in social and political values in China. For centuries the entire Chinese governmental mechanism has been highly centralized, and this has been reflected in Chinese cultural attitudes concerning governance. There are no similar structural and cultural parallels in the North American context. But in the end, they argue that the vast socioeconomic and political inequality in China—affecting teachers and students, the quality ofschools, and the labor market—overwhelms the centralized nature of curriculum planning and standards: "Teaching facilities at the key-note schools at the national and provincial levels are likely first class and far above the requirement of the unified curriculum, comparable to international standards. While ordinary schools are far beyond die reach ofthe requirement ofthe national curriculum " (sic) (p. 169). And, "Therefore, the prioritization ofeducational resources created by the national curriculum in fact generates the prioritization of social interest" (p. 170). Therein lies the lesson of a centralized, unified national curriculum. In sum, this book delivers on its promise, although it would have benefited from a strong editorial hand. Vilma Seeberg Vilma Seeberg is an assistantprofessor ofinternational-intercultural education at Kent State University. Roderick MacFarquhar. The Origins ofthe Cultural Revolution. Volume 3, The Coming ofthe Cataclysm, 1961-1966. Oxford: Oxford University Press; New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 733 pp. Hardcover $47.50, isbn 0-231-11082-0. Twenty-three years after the publication ofthe first volume ofthis trilogy on the origins ofthe Cultural Revolution, we now have the much-awaited final volume. Like the first two, this final installment is also meticulously researched and attractively produced. Indeed, the intervening years since the publication ofvolume 1 in 1974 have seen the release ofa torrent ofnew documents and publications in China, and MacFarquhar has taken full advantage ofthe newly available materials. Volume 3 has a total ofmore than 2,400 notes, compared with just un- 198 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. ?, Spring 1999 der 1,500 in volume 1 and more than 1,900 in volume 2. Each note in volume 3 also appears to be longer than the average note in the earlier volumes; many are, in fact, brief essays. In spite ofthe great length ofthis volume and of the trilogy as a whole, the central thesis ofvolume 3 is quite straightforward. MacFarquhar argues that two related developments, the failure ofthe Great Leap Forward and the vicissitudes in Sino-Soviet relations, can largely (though not fully) explain why Mao chose to turn on his heir apparent, state president Liu Shaoqi, and launch the Cultural Revolution. The colossal failure of the GLF plunged China into the worst famine in human history, pitted society against the state, fundamentally altered the attitudes ofChina's top leaders toward rural organizations, and sowed the seeds of suspicion in Mao toward his colleagues. Meanwhile, the retreat from Stalinism in the Soviet Union and the Sino-Soviet dispute caused Mao to worry about "a similar betrayal of the revolution in China" (p. 6). These concerns plus genuine political differences between Mao and Liu sealed Liu's fate. Mao's attack against Liu thus had both domestic and international dimensions. Indeed, when this volume, like the first two, is translated into Chinese, Chinese readers will find an image ofLiu Shaoqi that is considerably at variance with conventional wisdom in China. Radier than the number one capitalist roader that he was accused of being during the Cultural Revolution, Liu comes through these pages as Mao's lieutenant but especially a Party man who oversaw the Party machine and was bent on maintaining control. During the Socialist Education Movement that followed the Great Leap debacle, for example, Liu veered toward the extreme left and spearheaded a purge of rural Party members and cadres with ruthless thoroughness. In contrast, Mao was more tolerant ofgrassroots cadres and saw problems higher up. Seen in today's perspective, readers will likely have some sympathy for Mao's removal ofLiu, ifnot for the profound humiliation Liu was made to endure. The portrait...

Weeding out the ‘Gang of Four’

The arrest of the ‘Gang of Four’ in 1976 was followed by a ban on books ‘peddling the black wares’ of the fallen gang. Books which called Deng Xiaoping the ‘arch unrepentant biggest capitalist roader within the Party’ were recalled for changes. And books previously banned were put back on public sale, thereby generating queues of buyers outside the bookshops

Market Socialist Capitalist Roaders: A Comment on Arnold

Scott Arnold's recent paper, “Marx and Market Socialism,” advances a provocative thesis: market socialists are advocating an economic system that has a strong, internally generated tendency to revert to capitalism. They are, in short, “capitalist roaders” (Arnold, 1987).

Answers to Questions Concerning the "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of the Party since the Founding of the PRC"

The "Resolution" does not have much to say about the Socialist Education Movement, but if one reads closely one can see that major questions about it are raised. Please pay attention to the sentence from Section 17 that says "Quite a number of cadres at the grass-roots level were unjustly dealt with in the latter half of 1964."1 This is criticizing Comrade Liu Shaoqi without mentioning his name. At Eighth Central Committee's Tenth Plenary Session, Comrade Mao Zedong once again brought up class struggle but said not to disrupt economic readjustment. However, he himself did not pay much attention to the economic readjustment and concentrated on carrying out class struggle, encouraging all areas to set up experimental stations. By May 1963 he had worked up the so-called First Ten Articles. The calculations of these "First Ten Articles" regarding the state of class struggle in the villages were quite severe and overdone. After the passage of the "First Ten Articles" Comrade Liu Shaoqi wanted Comrade Wang Guangmei to go to Taoyuan in Hebei province to set up an experimental station, and then he went on to make up the "Latter Ten Articles." As it was, Comrade Mao Zedong had already been quite severe in his estimate of the class struggle situation in the countryside, but after the experiences of the Taoyuan experimental station Comrade Shaoqi was even more severe in his calculations. He saw that even after having gone through socialist reconstruction the villages were still places where the party could only work in secrecy, conspiratorially, unable to be openly active; as for the cadres at the grass-roots level, the work groups should push them aside as soon as they entered the villages. Propaganda about the Taoyuan experience was certainly a major stimulus to socialist education in the countryside. Comrade Mao Zedong was later to say that he talked for two years and no one would listen, but with Comrade Shaoqi in charge the whole country was propelled forward. But as the estimate of the rural condition did not accord with reality, there arose the problem of attacks on cadres at the grass-roots level that were too strong and too broad. The "Twenty-three Articles" were personally sponsored and drawn up by Comrade Mao Zedong and played a positive role in correcting the problem of launching too strong and too broad attacks on cadres at the grass-roots level. But although his assessment of the rural situation was more correct than that of Comrade Shaoqi, there was in fact no fundamental change. The saying at the time was "We have only two-thirds of the country," which meant that two-thirds of the lower-level units remained in our control whereas one-third of the leadership authority had been taken over by others. Moreover, in the "Twenty-three Articles" it was mentioned that the thrust of the movement should be to punish those in power taking the capitalist road. Comrade Mao Zedong and Comrade Liu Shaoqi had a conversation during a meeting. Comrade Mao Zedong said three times that there were already capitalist roaders in the countryside and that the focus of the movement should be to punish them. Comrade Shaoqi neither disagreed nor agreed; neither after saying it once or twice nor after having said it for the third time did he indicate either opposition or approval. And what did he finally say? That the conditions in the villages were complex, that all sorts of contradictions overlapped-contradictions between ourselves and the enemy overlapped with contradictions among the people-all of which needed concrete analysis. One might say that each was talking about what he wanted to say without listening to the other. When the "Twenty-three Articles" were passed Comrade Shaoqi had to express agreement. At this meeting Comrade Zhou Enlai played a very positive role. When talking about the capitalist roaders having backstage supporters on every level in the countryside, the original draft said that there were also backers in the Central Committee. Comrade Zhou Enlai said, is it not overdoing it to say that there are backers everywhere in the Central Committee? Thus it was changed to read that there were backers in every department at the center. Comrade Shaoqi asked, if Rao Shushi was a capitalist roader and it was I who promoted him and put him in important positions, does that mean that I am the backer of Rao Shushi? The atmosphere at the meeting was rather tense.

The cultural revolution (1966–1978) in Maoist and Dengist strategies of development

“I saw you 11 years ago, Secretary Lu … at a meeting at school. You'd come to tell us about fighting the Japanese … I thought you were a great man; you were a real living symbol of something, a symbol of the older revolutionaries who had struggled hard to change things, the glorious traditions they had, how they were our models. Then, two months later I saw you again … It was the summer of 1966. I'd gone to the University sports ground to see the capitalist roaders being struggled against. A whole line of them was brought out. You were in that line.” (Peng Xiaolei in Liu Xinwu's “Awake, my brother,” The Wounded, Joint Publications, Hong Kong, 1979, p. 193.)

The Image of a "Capitalist Roader"--Some Dissident Short Stories in the Hundred Flowers Period

Previous articleNext article No AccessStudiesThe Image of a "Capitalist Roader"--Some Dissident Short Stories in the Hundred Flowers PeriodSylvia ChanSylvia Chan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 2Jul., 1979 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2158732 Views: 6Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref Journal History This article was published in The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs (1979-1995), which is continued by The China Journal (1995-present). Copyright Australian Journal of Chinese AffairsPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Karl Gerth Unending Capitalism, 9 (May 2020).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139025225Gaofeng Meng The Household Responsibility System, Karl Marx's Theory of Property and Antony M. Honoré's Concept of Ownership, Science & Society 83, no.33 (Jul 2019): 300–326.https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2019.83.3.300Lu Jin On William Empson’s Romantic Legacy in China, (Feb 2019): 119–141.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3001-8_5

A Rebuttal of the "Gang of Four's" Fabrication — The "Duality in Socialist Production Relations"

In their vain attempt to usurp the highest power of the Party and the state, restore capitalism, and impose the dictatorship of the landlords and the bourgeoisie, the Wang, Zhang, Jiang and Yao anti-Party gang of four came up with a counterrevolutionary political program that identified the old cadres as democrats and the democrats as capitalist roaders. They alleged that a bourgeoisie existed in the Communist Party and pointed their spearheads toward a large number of leadership comrades in the Party, the government and the armed forces at both the central and the local levels.

Moscow and Peking

HE PRESENT Sino-Soviet conflict, with its ominous overtones of military confrontation, is not a conflict between nation-states as conceived by most commentators in the past and still represented today in the pluralist state system of the Free World. Rather it is a conflict between two Communist powers, both sharing basically the same MarxistLeninist ideology and the same domestic and international goals. Domestically, they claim to work toward the self-regulating collective, and internationally toward a Socialist world order brought about by worldwide revolution. These are still the proclaimed goals both in Moscow and Peking. If they mutually accuse each other today of having become capitalist roaders, revisionists, and social-imperialists, or of not ever having fully understood Marxist-Leninist doctrine because of a peasant mentality or petit bourgeois fanaticism, these accusations demonstrate that it is not the goal, but the defections from it, that each side accuses the other of. For both, Marxism-Leninism is the professed framework of all policy. To follow this fraternal fight, let us go back for a moment to the origins of the family relations between the Soviet and Chinese Communists before the conflict started.

"Massliners" versus "Capitalist Roaders" in China's Education Ring: Round Four to "Capitalist Roaders"?

Previous articleNext article No AccessReports"Massliners" versus "Capitalist Roaders" in China's Education Ring: Round Four to "Capitalist Roaders"?Mathew ZachariahMathew Zachariah Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 23, Number 1Feb., 1979 Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/446016 Views: 6Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1979 The Comparative and International Education SocietyPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:, WEIMING LI Advances in Chinese Library and Associated Information Services since the Mid-1970s, (Mar 2015): 103–154.https://doi.org/10.1108/S0065-2830(1991)0000015006Mathew Zachariah Continuity between school curriculum and vocation: Manual labour's ineffective role, International Review of Education 34, no.22 (Jun 1988): 207–224.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01874546Ed Porter Foreign involvement in China's colleges and universities, International Journal of Intercultural Relations 11, no.44 (Jan 1987): 369–385.https://doi.org/10.1016/S0147-1767(87)80004-4

Two Models of Agricultural Development: A Context for Current Chinese Policy

Less than three years ago, in the early stages of the anti-Teng Hsiao-p'ing campaign of 1976, the Chinese press abounded with statements of the following kind:[Capitalist roaders] energetically peddle the economic thinking of the bourgeoisie, saying that science and technology are most important… They advocate letting experts run factories, oppose putting proletarian politics in command and advocate material incentives… They oppose the activation of both central and local initiatives and reimpose the practice of “direct central control” …by the ministry concerned, oppose walking on two legs, lay onesided stress on things big and foreign, and oppose independence and selfreliance.

The Rise and Fall of Teng Hsiao-P’ing

THE REHABILITATION and meteoric rise of Teng Hsiao-p'ing between 1973 and early 1976 were without doubt the most salient feature in Chinese leadership affairs during the period. By the same token, his unexpected fall after Chou En-lai's death in January 1976 seems a watershed event. Teng's second career, though brief, was highly significant; and an understanding of his fate may help us to see the present leadership struggle in China in proper perspective. This essay is an attempt to analyze the causes of Teng's rise and fall, and the meaning of these events for the politics of post-Mao China. Teng's sudden rehabilitation, and his rise to the top of the Chinese leadership hierarchy (Teng handled Chou En-lai's functions as Premier, and was also Mao's stand-in for a number of months), were as surprising as they were unexpected. Although considered too old to be Mao's successor in any permanent sense, he was clearly Number Two when Chou died. Since his age presumably shielded him from attack by the Party left, it was widely assumed that he would someday be the interim leader of Communist China, if Mao passed from the scene before he did. Hence Teng would be in position to manage the problem of succession, and to groom Mao's eventual heir. Then came the wholly unexpected announcement in January that Teng would not replace Chou as Premier. Subsequently, he was assailed as a capitalist roader by Mao and others in the top leadership, and stripped of his official positions. He disappeared from sight, and for months his whereabouts were unknown. Since Mao's death and the recent purge of high Party leaders on the left (including Chiang Ch'ing, Teng's principal rival), there has been some speculation that Teng may yet stage another comeback. To be sure, his removal from power early last year cannot be seen as anything other than official and permanent. The style of the moves against him, including systematic