ABSTRACT
Rarely have analysts been able to view unbridled popular interest at play in the PRC. When Mao demolished the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the forces of order in the Cultural Revolution, long festering divisions among students and among workers burst into view. However, most reflections of popular views in China, particularly before the advent of surveys in the mid-and late-1980s, were reconstructed by government “spin doctors” whose role was to filter citizen beliefs through a thick veneer of state interests before presenting them in official reports. Awareness of these distortions often leads us to wonder what people actually thought.
