ABSTRACT
In 1966-1975, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) was put to its severest test since the Korean War—the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In a domestic crisis involving illegal or extra-legal challenges to the authority of the state, a professional officer corps would be expected to avoid political involvement as much as possible. The behavior of the PLA main forces was very "professional" indeed, and regional force officers behaved far more "professionally" than might have been expected. Parris Chang argues that until late 1965 the army was just being used as an example to reform the Chinese Communist Party, and that it was only then that the PLA began to be used consciously by Mao Tse-tung to circumvent the party. The PLA was the only organization with high prestige in the whole country. The PLA was pushed and pulled, willy-nilly, into the civilian Cultural Revolution through January 1967—usually to protect vital installations and preserve order.
