ABSTRACT

The People's Liberation Army (PLA) had played a decisive role in starting the Cultural Revolution, and it continued to support the Mao-Lin faction after the Eleventh Plenum. The course of the Cultural Revolution and its power seizure campaign provided a telling example of the nature of the Maoist civil-military dualism—a dualism in which the two elites were both interlocked and separate, both cooperative and competitive. The power seizure campaign failed primarily because the regional and district commanders sided with the civilian power holders in resisting Maoist attacks. This resistance proved powerful enough to force Mao to abandon his original plan for a complete redistribution of power. A large-scale civil war surely would have worsened the economy, which was already in a state of paralysis. In some cases, the local power holders conducted "sham power seizures" by their own supporters in order to preempt genuine ones by the Maoist rebels.