The Shanghai January storm was a watershed moment for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Cultural Revolution, or GPCR), dramatically transforming the party-state for a time, and appeared to offer a mass political alternative to party-state dominated model common in all state-socialist societies. Despite the impressive radical reorganization of the local state brought about by the unrest of 1966 and 1967, Shanghai was hardly representative in its general pattern of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) nationwide.[1] Indeed, the effect of the overthrow of the Shanghai Party Committee (SPC) and the establishment of a “Commune” in early 1967 was explosive, however no other major city, save Nanning, saw a popular rebellion overwhelm the party-state structure in such a marked fashion as Shanghai.[2]
The Cultural Revolution can be divided into two sequences; one ‘active’ characterized by intense mass activity in conjunction with chaotic rebel violence, the second ‘passive’, with byzantine power struggles and organized campaigns of state repression, dragnets for radicals and esoteric debates. The initial explosive florescence of mass mobilization from the fall of 1966 through to the tail end of 1968 is followed by a coda, or a ‘tail’, which marks the reorganization and recomposition of the heavily damaged CPC that in the end would amount to a restoration of a party form less fractious towards pre-1966 norms. The story of Shanghai likewise can be divided according to this schema, although the restoration of order occurred earlier than elsewhere in the country in the wake of a successful rebel lead power seizure. One crucial difference remains: Shanghai’s working class, so instrumental in the overthrow of the municipal government and party, retained gains made and their formal institutions continued activist politics, albeit in a bureaucratized form, through to the end of the Cultural Revolution.[3]
Shanghai’s Cultural Revolution began in the Summer of 1966, much as elsewhere in the country, with the formation of ‘elite’ Red Guards,[4] but was followed by a later proliferation of rebel students who would come into conflict with the former. Concurrently, big character posters (or dazibao) began to appear in the factories; Wang Hongwen, who would later become the head of Shanghai’s radical coalition, the Workers General Headquarters (Workers Headquarters, or WGHQ), posted the first of these. The worker movement remained marginal until later in the fall, after which it eclipsed the student movement following the Liberation Daily incident[5] and became central; conservative workers who supported the SPC organized and fought pitched battles with the rebels, but the rebels’ recognition from Beijing and the support of the Shanghai garrison forced a swift defeat of the Scarlet Guards. Rendered increasingly paralyzed in the fall of 1966 onwards, the SPC and municipal government collapsed in January to be replaced by a WGHQ dominated “Shanghai Commune”, chaired by Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan. Mao ultimately abandoned the Commune form and sanctioned its replacement month later by a new model, the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, a ‘three-in-one’ combination of radicals, veteran cadres and military representatives. After the birth of the new order in Shanghai, there came a series of challenges to the SRC from the ‘left’, i.e., by disaffected groups of rebels who felt the new order too closely resembled the old. Factional fighting, however, was lessened comparatively to the rest of the country because of the swift support of the local PLA and the disarmament of factions. The first of these challenges came from a section of the WGH, called the “2nd Regiment” and led by Geng Jinzheng; the second was in a Diesel engine factory led by a group identified as Lian Si. Both challenges were defeated by the WGHQ and its allies, and serious factional conflict was no longer an issue in Shanghai after the fall of 1967.[6] Following the mass mobilization phase, Shanghai politics were characterized by a predominance of radical intellectuals (lead by Zhang Chunqiao) and a rump of worker rebels (WGHQ and Wang Hongwen),[7] leading a protracted process of subterranean factional struggle, but nonetheless the workers had made some institutional gains within government, only to ultimately be rolled back with the end of the Cultural Revolution and the beginning of economic liberalization.
I aim to reflect upon several themes and points of investigation: first, the observation that the January Storm is still undertheorized and far from completely understood – it requires a thorough re-reading to clarify the central issues of mass politics, faction formation, communist relationship to the military, etc: we must therefore ask, why wasn’t Shanghai able to ‘export’ its model & why did it go down to defeat? Second, Shanghai’s Cultural Revolutionary politics proved pivotal moment in communist history, such that it marks the terminus of classical Marxist-Leninist practice and most significantly points to the exhaustion of the old Leninist party-state form. Finally, the January Storm, as a pivotal even of the GPCR, is a political condition for the birth of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and provides raw material for the basis of a Maoist intervention in politics – the mass party, class struggle within the party/state institutions, the centrality of mass mobilization in politics, and so forth.
While limitations and ambiguities persist when using Shanghai as a national model for understanding the development of politics in the Cultural Revolution, I believe Shanghai, is an event of world-historical significance within the communist movement, as long as the difficulties are fully recognized. Here one of PRC’s largest cities oversaw a massive popular upheaval and, though undoubtedly with manipulation from Beijing and the Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG), saw the overthrow of the local party apparatus and large sections of the municipal government of Shanghai. This was an act quintessential of the Cultural Revolution that has rightly been pointed out as astonishing and enigmatic – the leadership of a strong, centralized state apparatus breathtaking in its size and control, calling upon popular mobilization outside of its control to overthrow that very apparatus, or at least its civilian core. It is an act that is quite inexplicable according to common perceptions of so-called totalitarian societies, yet it is not so if we understand the Cultural Revolution in the multifaceted context of its time. This context is represented by a number of strains, overdetermined, in Althusserian parlance[8], by the following: the first cluster includes the bureaucratization and “technocratization” of the Chinese Revolution following in the wake of 1949, the emergence of new class formations, elite factional struggles, and persistent injustices and inequalities in Chinese society.[9] On the other hand, a second cluster includes roots such as the Chinese search for an alternate modernity[10] international geopolitics[11] including the Sino-soviet Split, and the dark shadow of the failure of the Great Leap Forward (GLF) – and this list, seemingly exhaustive, is far from being complete.[12]
As with the Cultural Revolution in general, the January Storm has remained undertheorized despite the relatively abundant amount of primary and secondary material on this historical episode. This is true for Marxists as well as their interlocutors and largely has to do with the general global retreat of the communist idea over the past several decades. Nonetheless, there remain two (although not the only) essential positions that one can take up in relation to a general analysis of Shanghai’s revolution. First, one can take the position of something of an autopsy report, stating that it, along with the Cultural Revolution was but more chaos, tyranny and in the end murder and pure criminality; if we are to understand it at all, it is only to avoid it in the future – this position generally focuses on power struggles between party-cliques and mob violence while evading the aspirations and organizational choices of ordinary Chinese. The second position is that of a historical partisanship and an ultimately affirmative one: the Shanghai revolution marked a radical political construction akin to the Paris Commune, and that this option was ultimately betrayed or foreclosed, the perpetrators of which differ depending upon the author’s party.[13] I tend to chart a course whereby political lessons can be drawn, both in positive and negative capacities. But how are we to assess the Commune? I do not believe it possible to give a definitive answer soon let alone in this paper; so, the interventions here, again, are a proverbial ‘notes toward an investigation’. First, and it is not necessary to point out, the Commune no longer exists; its lifespan was about that of the years given for the traditional chronology of the Cultural Revolution.[14] Dismantled and replaced by what would ultimately develop into a neoliberal technocratic arrangement, the Commune had a short lifespan that was entirely dependent upon the prevailing political realities moment to moment. Because, so to speak, it was a ‘state that did not last’, we cannot say it was a victory, although some advances appeared for a time.
We must also understand communist subjectivity in order to understand the conscious, or ideological raison d’etre for undertaking the event, and therefore to some extent we must be familiar with Mao both as a person and as a theoretician. This latter familiarity is often woefully inadequate or at least refuses to take communism on its own terms, with the inevitable result of transforming every event into an incomprehensible crime. But the question of the influence of the rebels, conservatives and rank and file students, peasants and proletarians is largely a question of political innovation on the one hand and a desire to fulfill forestalled promises of the Chinese Revolution, or to even overturn new inequalities and iniquities spawned by the new state socialist order.[15] For philosopher Alain Badiou, Communism is characterized by what he identifies as the “Communist invariants,”[16] and as scholars like Wu write,[17] China, in its bid to industrialize to compete with capitalism and protect its interests on the international stage, found development inverting or rolling back commitment to implementation of these invariants. Shanghai and its population were no exception to this rule, and many of the motivations of actors involved themselves with frustrations with the inadequacies and disappointments of 17 years of state socialism.
II. ANALYSIS AND REINTERPRETATIONS
Despite the now more probable view that formation of factions was radically undetermined by class background, Shanghai’s Cultural Revolutionary history can be analyzed by interest-group analysis to a greater degree than many other localities in China at the time.[18] This meant that radical and proletarian politics, in a fashion recognizable to a Marxist historian, played a more direct role in the upheaval and transformation in Shanghai than elsewhere, where often power struggles were completely depoliticized and of no consequence to the status quo. Nonetheless, the clear relation between interest and factional formation, power seizure and the restoration of order are imperiled by the work of Scholars like Perry and Li, Walder and Wu.
So what do we see when we observe the trajectory of the GPCR in Shanghai? In one respect we see a mass rebellion against the state, but this appearance is partially misleading due to the persistent and sometimes quite considerable intervention of different actors of the various state apparatuses – and those within factions within each respective apparatus – each attempting to manipulate mass unrest to their own advantage or otherwise to ward it off. While retroactively the January Storm is hailed as a coherent, unified process that was consciously organized, in reality it was an ad hoc series of campaigns and chaotic developments which would come to lead the local government and economy largely inoperative.[19] It was because of the increasing chaos that the revolution would be codified as a result of compromise between various mass organizations, state actors and military authorities seeking to find a way to restore order under conditions favorable to themselves.[20] In terms set out by the Sixteen Points,[21] such as the creation of governments of popularly elected mass organizations modeled after the Paris Commune, with democratic elections and so forth, the January Storm holds a mostly disappointing record, although the commune form made steps towards this direction in comparison with the old municipal government. Despite the spectacular mass rebellions and the formidable coalition headed by the premier Shanghai WGHQ, led by soon to be rising Maoist star and future member of the “Gang of Four,”[22] Wang Hongwen, the popular support commanded by the coalition was fractured at best – in fact, it is likely that only a minority of the Shanghai Population would have formally supported the formation of the Shanghai Commune and the later Revolutionary Committee.[23]
The WGHQ would later be a tool whereby other leftist rebels would be amalgamated, pushed aside or repressed when the time came, such as Geng Jinzheng’s 2nd Regiment and the Lian Si episode, which we will discuss as this project develops. Nonetheless, it is misleading to classify the post-revolutionary political settlement to be entirely in line with the pre 1966 status quo – Li and Xun make a successful case that the prominence of radicals and the incorporation of the rebels into the new order, which gave proletarians a not insignificant amount of representation in a government from which they had hitherto been largely excluded.[24] Any progress by the rebels, however, could not have occurred, or at least lasted for long, without the support of the Party Center (Mao and his faction), Shanghai party intellectuals, and crucially the People’s Liberation Army and their local garrison commander – all these factors meant that the January Revolution cannot be directly compared to the Paris Commune’s more classically horizontal rebellion. Workers maintained a degree of trade union autonomy unique in the history of the Mao era; ideological interventions remained regular in combatting a return to the Cultural Revolution’s status quo ante.[25] Eventually all would be rolled back after the Cultural Revolution, erasing any of the radical politics on display in Shanghai to this day.[26]
III. TOWARDS A MEANING OF THE JANUARY STORM
So what makes Shanghai politically significant, from a Marxist perspective, given these considerations? First, in a positive sense, it marked one of the most dramatic attempts of a society of the state-socialist type, which was a hallmark of the 20th century, of a government to reignite, or allow on stage the proletariat as a relatively autonomous force to make its intervention directly in state communist politics, and, to some extent, succeeded. While not quite offering a glimpse of a worker-owned future, it did forge a greater deal of strengthened industrial citizenship. Second, and this point is in the negative, despite the victory it showed the inability of the utopian aspirations of the Paris Commune to flourish under the state-socialist model developed along with Marxist-leninist politics, which gives communists a grave problem in determining the cause and what it might mean – the suppression of economics being a dark chapter in this story[27]. Third, it demonstrated that there were indeed subterranean political currents existent in the early People’s Republic, traditionally associated with communists in opposition, which came to the fore and became brief but brilliant and dazzling policies, only to be crushed and denounced for various reasons, as economism, ultra-leftism, etc. These examples include independent proletarian labor agitation, the protest against rustification and hukou status, the demonstration of temporary and contract labor, long exploited under a nominally workers’ state, and rebellion which agitated for the realization of the spirit of the 16 articles worthy of the name “Commune.”[28] I call this last section the emancipatory core of the Cultural Revolution suppressed by other statist and dogmatic avatars of this sequence, whether in the old cadre core or in the ranks of radical leftist bureaucrats. This is the aspect of the Cultural Revolution that can be a positive call to action in contemporary struggles, supporting the contemporary Maoist insistence that party formalism is not sufficient; revolutionary organs can turn against the interests of revolution and must be kept in check by practices including the mass line, the formation of mass organizations, and ideological struggles.[29]
[1] Walder, Agents of Disorder
[2] Walder, Agents or Disorder – In most cases, rural to mid sized towns and their provinces experienced an internal power seizure rather than a mass power seizure – meaning the majority were the causes of intrabureaucratic struggle and lead by government officials in their respective positions.
[3] Perry and Li, Proletarian Power
[4] The earlier or ‘elite’ Red Guards, also known as ‘conservatives’, were typically students from Red backgrounds organized en tandem with party organizations to mobilize defense of cadres from criticism. These organizations participated heavily in the attack of those without power in the socialist system to divert popular rage from power holders. (Maurice Meinser, Mao’s China Before and After)
[5] A Red Guard occupation of the Liberation Daily newspaper in November 1966 lead to clashes with conservatives opposing the occupation. The WGHQ came to the rescue of the Red Guards but the price for the students was their marginalization by the now more powerful radical workers.
[6] These conflicts are well documented in precious works referenced by Wu, Walder, Li & Perry, but also in Neale Hunter’s account of the GPCR in Shanghai (Hunter, Shanghai Journal)
[7] Many left-wing radicals and rebels, including in Shanghai, would be targeted by post-restoration purges such as those affiliated with the alleged May 16th Conspiracy and the Campaign to Cleanse Class Ranks. In both cases, certain sections of the CCP bureaucracy, along with the PLA, maneuvered Left and Right to eliminate potential rivals – this had the effect of eviscerating the leadership of all but a few of the rebels ascendent in the early, active phase of the GPCR. (These purges are well documented in Macfarquhar and Schoenhal’s work, “Mao’s Last Revolution”; there is also a discussion in the work aforementioned by Perry and Li.)
[8] “Contradiction and Overdetermination” – Louis Althusser, For Marx
[9] Namely Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaopeng on the one hand, Mao on the other,
[10] in the context of a larger revolutionary long duree (beginning from at least the 18th century) – for reference, see John K. Fairbank’s “The Great Chinese Revolution”
[11] The Cold War, Vietnam War, International Revolution in France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc., conflicts with imperialist nations and contradictions within the communist-bloc, among many others.
[12] Typically, narrative histories of the Cultural Revolution focus primarily on the struggles at the center of the state apparatus, and the GPCR as intra-factional struggle between Mao on the one hand and Liu and Deng on the other, while helpful, are limited and fail to answer many questions about the GPCR’s coming and going.
[13] For more in this direction, see Jiang Hongsheng’s “The Paris Commune in Shanghai: The Masses, the State, and Dynamics of `Continuous Revolution’”
[14] 1967-76, whereas the Cultural Revolution is most typically understood as having begun in 1966 and ended with Mao’s death in November, 1976.
[15] This phenomena is what I choose to refer to as revisionism, rather than a specific violation of dogmatic orthodoxy. Meisner describes the process wonderfully on a page in his seminal work on Mao’s China – “The decision to adopt the Soviet model of Industrialization necessitated soviet-type forms of political organization and state administration. Centralized economic planning demanded the bureaucratization and routinization of state and society. The Maoist preference for administrative simplicity gave way to complex and increasingly specialized structures; the cadres of a revolutionary party were transformed into adminsitrators and bureaucratic functionaries; workers in factories were subjected to increasing control by factory managers; the revolutionary ideal of the “Guerilla” generalist was replaced by a new-found faith in the virtues of specialization and the technological specialist; old egalitarian ideals clashed with a new hierarchy of ranks and new patterns of social inequality; the revolutionary faith in the initiative of the masses faded as industrialization demanded authoritarian discipline, social stability, and economic rationality; socialist goals were postponed and partly ritualized in favor of the immediate and all embracing goal of economic development.” – Meisner, P.114-115, “Mao’s China, Before and After”
[16] 1) Free association against anticapitalism, 2)The dissolution of Social Classes, the division of labor, the distinction between cities, manual and mental labor, 3) the withering away of the state and 4) proletarian internationalism. Badiou and Gauchet Debate, Greece and the Reinvention of Politics, etc.
[17] Yiching Wu, Cultural Revolution at the Margins
[18] My claim, based on works referenced elsewhere in the paper by Wu, Perry and Li
[19] Wu, Cultural Revolution at the Margins
[20] Wu, Cultural Revolution at the Margins
[21] 16 Articles – August, 1966, FLP
[22] Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, Yao Wenyuan – all radical maoist bureaucrats that were arrested and tried for the Cultural Revolution following Mao’s death.
[23] Walder, Zhang Chunqiao and the Shanghai Commune
[24] Wang Hongwen was himself a young factory security guard, and it would be remarkable how he would be ‘helicoptered’ to number 2 in the Communist Party later in the Cultural Revoluton, though he would ultimately be ousted as part of the ‘Gang of Four’. – Li and Xun, Proletarian Power
[25] Li and Xun, Proletarian Power
[26] Nonetheless, it must be conceded that without targeted military intervention early on, the factional violence so prevalent elsewhere may have engulfed Shanghai and paralyzed it to much greater effect than actually happened.
[27] I do not believe tenable the view that economism can be attributed to machinations of the conservative sections of the bureaucracy attempting to save itself by buying off the workers. I believe, as Wu observes, that while the bureaucracy did chose to appease economist demands, this was mostly out of a desire to defuse the increasingly chaotic situation and rebellious workforce. Many workers had grievances with the system; modes of exploitation immanent to the state capitalist mode of production in the PRC were quite entrenched and a sort of artificial class structure can be observed.
[28] Wu, Cultural Revolution at the Margins
[29] These are but some initial reflections on historiography of this important Cultural Revolutionary event which is so underplayed in dominant accounts of the GPCR while, perhaps over-idealized by eager Communist militants. The episodes which require investigating for a Marxist retelling of this event are several; first, there is the study of the worker activism known as ‘economism’; second, there is the WGHQ and its dissident factions, and finally, there is the Lian Si and other related rebels denounced as ‘ultra-left’ by the dominant radical organizations and government of Shanghai. While much has been documented regarding high-level factional dispute more needs to be done to describe and understand the coming of mass politics, how mass mobilization succeeds in consciously transforming power-relations and how it fails to truly force a break with the status quo ante.
Toward Recomposition 