ABSTRACT
One of the key issues facing any successful revolutionary regime is how to ensure that the goals of the revolution are not subverted by the later practice of the revolutionaries when in power. China was not unique in facing that dilemma, though Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the assault on ‘those in authority taking the capitalist road’ (and thus opposing his views and prescriptions for China’s future) provided an unusually dramatic way of dealing with such a situation. The examination of the emergence of the dominant class after 1949 considers the continuities as well as the changes brought about by both 1949 (the establishment of the PRC) and 1966 (the start of the Cultural Revolution). One goal is to consider the extent to which the new rulers may have institutionalized their positions. As might be expected, the new political leadership established in and after 1949 was overwhelmingly reflective of the CCP’s experience before that date, and was of necessity generalist, largely without formal education, and both geographically and socially unrepresentative of the country as a whole. More remarkably, though the social composition of the political leadership changed almost not at all even with the advent of the Cultural Revolution. The revolutionary generation that came to power in 1949 stayed there through 1978. Moreover, while many individuals lost their positions during the height of the Cultural Revolution 1966–1968, during 1976–1978 immediately after Mao’s death, most of them found themselves re-appointed to positions of leadership. Throughout the first three decades of the PRC, the professional elite provided an even bigger paradox: the children and grandchildren of the pre-1949 privileged classes may have been (largely) excluded from politics, but they were both able and encouraged to take leadership roles in education, health, and economic management, even to some extent continuing in post during the Cultural Revolution. By 1978 and the rejection of the politics of the Cultural Revolution, there was more than an opportunity for the emergence of not only a new development strategy but also a new leadership with its origins in the post-1949 experience of both the political and professional elites.
