ABSTRACT
At the Tenth Plenum Mao Zedong appealed to his Central Committee colleagues to “Never forget class struggle,” but he was only partially able to indicate concrete ways of translating that slogan into Party policies. As he put it at the time, work and class struggle were “two different kinds of problems” and “our work must not be jeopardized just because of class struggle,” 1 Much of the succeeding period leading up to the Cultural Revolution can be seen in terms of efforts by various actors in Chinese politics to come to terms with the contradiction between work and class struggle. Most analyses of the period depict a conflict between Mao and the leaders of the Party apparatus with the Chairman vigorously pushing measures to realize class struggle, while his Politburo colleagues and the bureaucracies they represented allegedly sought to resist his measures through obstruction and non-compliance. Here a different interpretation is offered: not only were Mao’s own attitudes on the question of realizing class struggle ambivalent and shifting, but for key political figures the object was less to oppose Mao than win him over. In the years up to 1966 both “radical” and “establishment” forces competed for the Chairman’s blessing, and it was only relatively late in the game that he came down on the side of those challenging the prevailing system.
