ABSTRACT
In addition to bourgeois right and superstructural remnants of the old order a third source of socioeconomic polarization and capitalist restoracion identified by Mao was bu reaucratic degeneration and an alliance between parry-state funct ionaries and the liberal and technocratic intelligentsia. The 1950s'events in Eastern Europe that demonstrated the power of students and intellectuals to mobilize people against an unpopular regime, the outcome of the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the "cult of the expert" accepted by Liu Shaoqi , Deng Xiaoping, Peng Zhen, and others in the post-GlF period, their resistance to the Socialist Education Movement and toleration for the liberal intellectuals' critiques of Mao's policies and leadership style heightened the Chairman's apprehensions regarding an emerging "political-literary nexus," which would act as a brake on fu rther revolut ionary progress. 1 In the last decade of his life, Mao's major ideological preoccupation was the need to explain the phenomenon of "reaction," i.e .• the Communist Party itself becoming the major obstacle to the attainment of a socialist society.
