Introduction

The analysis of factionalism among secondary school students seeks to demonstrate that the pattern of factional formation and factional participation grew directly out of the contradictions and conflicts which had already divided the students before the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR). The focus on secondary school students stems from the analysis of the educational structure as the most important determinant of upward mobility for Chinese students and an evaluation of the differing positions within this structure of three main classes of students and other youths. When the Chinese GPCR of the middle and late 1960s burst forth, the initial response both in China and the West seemed primarily to be one of mystification. The criticisms levelled against the educational system during the GPCR gave middle school students the opportunity to display the types of political activism that had become progressively trivialized in the pre-GPCR period.