Abstract
Agents of Disorder makes new contributions about chaos in Cultural Revolution sub-periods and locations. It discounts evidence about the causes of China’s disorder that developed from 1949 to 1966 as the regime labelled, monitored, and scared opponents to consolidate itself, before it had enough ‘expert’ personnel to support its ‘red’ ambitions.
State cadres led Cultural Revolution violence largely against other state cadres. What distinguished the two groups from each other? Andrew Walder’s sources are local annals published in the 1990s – especially their ‘chronology of major events’ sections. These provide no way to distinguish those attacking from those attacked, a quarter-century earlier. Without background biographical information about the actors, the book’s main thesis that their previous experiences did not much affect their Cultural Revolution behaviours is unproven.
Walder admits that in 1966 groups took ‘the opportunity to articulate their grievances . . . contract workers …, urban youths . . . demobilized soldiers’. These had resentments against bureaucrats who had repressed them. ‘From the outset, researchers viewed these violent factional conflicts as struggles of interest groups’ (pp. 3–4).
‘Cadre rebels’ then attacked fellow cadres (and others). ‘The state’s agents played a pivotal role in destroying the structures to which their group interests were intimately tied’ (p. 196). The book discounts that bureaucrats’ ‘interests’ could diverge during conflicts in ways related to their pre-1966 educations, families, or jobs. It nonetheless mentions a ‘writing group’ of ‘literati rebels’ (p. 45). It admits ‘departmental rivalries between cadres in the police and security apparatus and those in economic planning departments’ (p. 202). These data undermine the reductionist thesis of the book. Interests are socialized in both new and previous contexts. Of course they could change diversely and kaleidoscopically (e.g. when soldiers arrived). They can be either manifest or latent.
Walder says that earlier authors’ searches for longer-term motives in the Cultural Revolution relied on ‘then-new’ theories and available information of their times (p. 4). That critique of datedness applies to Walder also. He generates statistics from big data in 1990s annals. He redefines ‘structure’ as quick-changing, in a ‘kind of structural analysis’ (p. 202), blurring the usual distinction from ‘agency’.
The book’s second thesis, about chaos, is true. This reviewer should confess having published a book called Policies of Chaos: The Organizational Causes of Violence in China’s Cultural Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), one among many that Agents of Disorder discredits (p. 3). But Walder says a satisfactory explanation requires ‘detailed micro-level analysis of small-scale local settings’ (p. 202). Labelling, restraining, and scaring political enemies had become governmentally legitimated ‘processes upon which a plausible explanation’ can be based (p. 8), and evidence is abundant for all three policies in many Cultural Revolution stages and places.
‘China’s party-state, a single hierarchy’ (p. 18) is a major premise of the book, which does not explore more locally than county offices. In the 1960s, rural counties averaged over 300,000 people each (p. 91). Six-sevenths of Chinese lived in them. County offices are the smallest units the book considers. ‘Rebel activity’ there ‘in many cases was virtually non-existent’ (p. 75). When county annals in the 1990s reported that their governments had been ‘overthrown’ in 1967, it is difficult to know what this means. Rural cadres were victims as well as agents in their posts. County ‘takeovers’ sometimes resembled copycat phenomena. Even a large ‘power seizure’ was temporarily ‘fake’, leaving Guangdong’s ‘entire provincial leadership in place’ (p. 136).
An insight from Walder is that, although events are often explained by factors preceding them, he tries ‘understanding how collective action ends – in particular, the anticipated cost to participants of failing to prevail’ in conflicts with bosses who later remained in power (p. 154).
Likewise, the Cultural Revolution’s aftermath helps explain it. If the ‘national political hierarchy’ was so ‘highly disciplined and centralized’ in the late 1960s (pp. 21–2), how did local leaders of communes, brigades, and teams then lead a green revolution that soon developed into rural ‘sprouts of capitalism’ factories? These outbid state enterprises for industrial inputs, ignited China’s economic rise, inflated prices, and ended socialist planning for most commodities. This long-anticipated book’s premise about state power is too simple for its period.
Cultural Revolution links to later developments deserve more study. So does Guangxi Province, where a third of Cultural Revolution deaths were suffered (pp. 95–100, 138–40, and 216). Also, ‘The Jiangsu local annals reported a total of 3,877 deaths, while a published provincial history reported more than 30,000’ (p. 188). Similarly sharp reporting discrepancies were found in Beijing and Shanxi. The book provides interesting graphs of large data, but were the 1990s annals-writing bureaucrats without biases? Even more new books are needed.
The Cultural Revolution has been likened to a typhoon or volcanic eruption. Such events involve chaos, recursive effects, contingencies, and complex linkages. They are not totally impenetrable enigmas, as meteorologists and volcanologists know. The history of historical sociology, including Cultural Revolution studies, has not stopped – and that is good.