Andrew Walder's volume is a remarkable piece of scholarship of intellectual honesty and rigor. Backtracking over terrain that he has helped map, Walder returns to the notion that the political cleavages dividing Mao-era society drew from social ties forged between the formal hierarchy of party organizations and the networks of political loyalists on whom they depended in the workplace. The author acknowledges that he began his research on the Beijing Red Guard movement by extrapolating this model, successfully applied in his earlier work, to China's universities. Accordingly, he expected to find that the so-called conservative factions during the Cultural Revolution arose from networks of stalwart party members and political activists seeking to defend their party organizations from offensive attacks, whereas “radical” Red Guard factions drew their primary support from the ranks of the excluded and marginalized. However, Walder discovered that student political allegiances were defined not by putative class background, but instead by events that unfolded during the first two months of the Cultural Revolution. As is now well known, in June and July 1966, outside work teams of party members dispatched by central ministries descended onto Beijing's campuses to restore order in the face of mounting turmoil. Instead, Walder argues, they paralyzed campus party organizations and shattered existing networks, leaving institutions in a more chaotic state than they had been before their arrival.
Overturning the assumption that the work teams served as bulwarks of party authority, facing down so-called radical challengers outside the party hierarchy, Walder's careful reconstruction of events from Red Guard newspapers, wall posters, and transcripts reveals that it was loyal party members who often ended up leading the militant radical minority to oppose the work teams. Walder identifies two general patterns that emerged across the twenty-seven Beijing campuses in his sample. The first wave of work teams dispatched in early June tended to follow a more conservative path of defending the party leadership at the schools to which they were assigned. In the second wave of work teams dispatched in mid-June, however, the more radical strategy of attacking a school's power structure became increasingly prevalent as campus actors imitated the drama unfolding at Beijing University, where a small opposition group within the party organization received work team support in attacking the school president and party secretary. The radical strategy adopted by the work team dispatched to Qinghua University was taken as a signal by many that the more radical course had the imprimatur of the party center, encouraging imitators at other capital campuses after mid-June.
The sudden withdrawal of the work teams at the end of July 1966 thus created four groups: the majority, who had actively or passively cooperated with the work teams; an internally divided minority, comprising those who had challenged the work teams and had been punished; those who had fallen under political suspicion but did not oppose the work teams; and those who had been directly targeted or attacked in the process. Walder finds that the spiral into chaotic violence began when minority members joined forces to attack central ministry offices that had dispatched the work teams in hopes of recovering the potentially incriminating files compiled by the work teams while on campus. When Mao and the Central Cultural Revolution Group supported the attacks, these disparate groups realigned not within their own campuses, but between and across school boundaries, where they were encouraged, protected, and then ultimately betrayed by various factional actors at the center. In the final analysis, Walder reads the Cultural Revolution as neither a grassroots, bottom-up eruption of genuine social grievances, nor as a top-down exercise in “repressive collective action,” but rather as “extensive mass participation in a tumultuous episode of bureaucratic politics” (p. 259).
The conclusions that Walder teases from this challenging analytical exercise are broad and theoretically ambitious. Arguing against interpretations that seek to fix either preexisting identities or interests as the determinants of individual behavior, Walder emphasizes the role played by choices made—often in unstable contexts—in shaping contingent outcomes that may prove consequential for individuals who see themselves as little more than victims of circumstance.
This is not an easy book, and that may well be both its greatest strength and its chief weakness. Despite the author's efforts to bring order to chaos, the detailed description of the full range of local variations makes it difficult for even an engaged reader to follow at times, which may not recommend the book to nonspecialist and undergraduate audiences. But it is precisely because Walder consistently refuses to simplify that his powerful account of Beijing's Red Guard movement captures its unpredictability, its volatility, and, above all, its internal complexity. Read alongside Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhal's magisterial Mao's Last Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006) and Joel Andreas's provocative Rise of the Red Engineers (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), Walder's fine contribution pushes us to reevaluate what we thought we knew about this pivotal period in modern Chinese history and, perhaps, to reflect again on the scope and breadth of its lingering irresolution.
