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cadres who had passed the test of the Cultural Revolution and who pledged
unequivocal loyalty to the utopian vision and policies of Mao Zedong were
incorporated into the new Revolutionary Committees. Red Guard organiza-
tions were disarmed and disbanded, with a few of their leaders who were
willing to accommodate the restoration of bureaucratic order being incorpo-
rated into that rebuilt order. Red Guards unwilling to abandon rebellion were
dealt with very harshly by the army. Large numbers of former Red Guards
were executed as vagrants and anarchists in a “purification of class ranks”
campaign that stressed hierarchy and order, not rebellion against author-
ity. The mass movements that now occurred were once again tightly con-
trolled by party organizations, the normal arrangement in Leninist systems.
After the demise of Lin Biao in September 1971, a cohort of cadres purged
during 1966–1968 were restored to cadre positions under the aegis of Zhou
Enlai.^2 The abrupt transformation of Lin Biao by CCP propaganda organs
following his demise from close comrade-in-arms and trusted successor
of Mao Zedong to long-term traitor and schemer caused many people to
question for the first time the myths they had previously accepted, although
this phenomenon did not become apparent until much later. By puncturing
the myth of Mao’s eternal correctness, the Lin Biao affair also made Mao
more desirous of a grand diplomatic breakthrough with the United States
that might restore his badly tarnished image. More apparent at the time, the
violence, cruelty, hypocrisy, and unreason associated with the Red Guard
upheaval had led many people to question the utopian ideas used to justify
that violence.
While Mao faced the immense problem of consolidating the new revolu-
tionary state the Cultural Revolution had created, the PRC faced powerful
Soviet armies to its north, American military forces across the East Asian
littoral, and an aggressive India (or so it seemed to Mao) to China’s south.
Of these several enemies, the Soviet Union posed the greatest threat to the
new order just established by the Cultural Revolution upheaval. Many of the
ex-cadres just purged from power sympathized with the prodevelopment pol-
icies adopted by the more pragmatic-minded CCP leaders, Mao’s opponents.
Unlike those purged by Stalin in the 1930s, most of those purged by Mao
during the Cultural Revolution were still alive when that upheaval ebbed.
Maoist charges of links between CCP pragmatists and the USSR were probably
apocryphal and fabricated to malign Mao’s imagined rivals. Yet the policies
favored by CCP pragmatists were, in fact, similar to those being implemented
in the Soviet Union. Cadres purged during the Cultural Revolution plus those
who escaped the purge but who secretly doubted Mao’s course constituted
a social base for possible Soviet intervention in China. There was nothing
comparable regarding the United States. China’s “bourgeoisie” had been
long since been thoroughly crushed and was far removed from the centers
of power in the PRC. The prospect of a US-supported invasion to return the