From the Socialist Education Movement onwards, folk religion specialists – now classed as ‘superstition professionals’ (akin to ‘religious professionals’) -- were targeted for re-education. Spirit mediums were singled out because of their number and their central role in healing. This was the prelude to the Four Olds Campaign inaugurated by the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when religious sites were destroyed and religious specialists came under attack from Red Guards, despite the fact that ‘religion’ was never named as one of the ‘four olds’. Two features of Cultural Revolution politics are explored: the use of iconoclasm – especially in relation to the Confucius Temple in Qufu; and the attempt to ‘revolutionize the environment’, which entailed renaming streets, shops, and consumer items, and painting buildings red. It ends with the fitful Campaign to Criticize Confucius and Lin Biao (1973–6), which engaged the rural and urban populace in a polemical critique of some simple Confucian texts.

In November 1972, in the course of talking about public security and protection work, Premier Zhou issued important directives on reactivating and developing informants. Below are his key points (wording not checked by the Premier):

The Premier said the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution resulted in an ideological mobilisation and a mobilisation of the masses. The major weakness in our work now is that we are no longer sufficiently in touch with what is happening in society. The first issue that must be resolved is in the public security sector, where informants must be reactivated and results must be achieved before the end of this year. Our contacts among foreign expatriates, for example, were in some respects quite useful.

In May 1966, Agent 594 had just begun his third year as a HUMINT asset of the Cultural Protection Division of the municipal Public Security Bureau on one of Harbin‘s college campuses. An ambitious teacher in his mid-twenties from a non-proletarian family background and engaged but not yet married, Agent 594 started out hoping his overall career would benefit from serving as an agent, but the head of the Cultural Protection Division had not been particularly impressed and informed the officer who had recruited him that ‘from the looks of it, this guy is willing to do the job, but he has only limited skills’. Agent 594 met his case officer regularly once a month and, on the whole, had very little to report, but suddenly all that changed in early June 1966 when the CCP leadership in Beijing announced that regular teaching had been suspended and students on campuses all over China would be called upon to henceforth concentrate full time on conducting a Great Cultural Revolution.

‘Undercover cadres’ and ‘agents’ are the products of the Liu [Shaoqi], Deng [Xiaoping], Peng [Zhen], and Luo [Ruiqing] counter-revolutionary revisionist line and its aggressive promotion of ‘isolationism’ and ‘mysticism’ in the public security, procuracy, and legal sectors. So-called undercover cadres and agents are, for the most part, landlord, rich peasant, counter-revolutionary, bad, Rightist elements, renegades, tewu, Catholic priests, monks, imams, senior officers in Chiang Kai-shek‘s bandit army, core elements in reactionary political parties and organisations, or degenerate [Communist Party] elements. They form a counter-revolutionary fifth column created to prepare in organisational terms for the restoration of capitalism. From what the masses have brought to light, when utilisation of ‘agents’ peaked in our province, their number in the province as a whole exceeded 28,000. According to the original Public Security Bureau statistics for the second half of 1965, the total number of ‘agents’ in the province that year totalled 2,581.

These guidelines regarding the recruitment and use of agents (here referred to as the development of informants) show how, after years of uncertainty, one operational component responsible for the security of critical infrastructure responded to the demands of China’s central government for a revival of agent work. Subjects covered in the guidelines include the principles and demands to guide recruitment, the scope and qualifications of targets, deactivation, authority to recruit, running, record keeping, and more. Some minor modifications aside, there is no alternative paradigm at work here, and what the guidelines propose differs little from what had been the case prior to 1967. As far as HUMINT is concerned, the Cultural Revolution (1966–1969) had now become something more akin to an aberration than, as originally intended, ‘a new stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country, a deeper and more extensive stage’.

The unjust court sentencing and execution of poor peasant Dong Changbao and his son, Dong Renhuo, in Yongkang county in 1958 was yet another heinous crime committed by the handful who held power in the old public security, procuracy, and legal sectors and who relied on agents to subject the labouring people to blood-stained oppression. It is also ironclad evidence of the old public security, procuracy, and legal sectors enforcing a bourgeois dictatorship.

In accordance with our great leader Chairman Mao’s teaching that ‘public security organs must conduct more systematic operational work’ and on the basis of stronger Party Committee leadership and implementation of the mass line, covert assets (henceforth to be uniformly referred to as informants rather than as agents) capacity building and utilisation of necessary technical operational instruments are to be reinforced so as to allow us to engage in covert struggle energetically as well as shrewdly and to effectively mitigate and strike at acts of sabotage by tewu, spies, and hidden counter-revolutionary elements. …

The period 1966–1976 saw the rise and fall of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, China witnessed its third wave of decentralized industrialization and the fiercest protests of temporary workers of the Mao era. This chapter starts by providing an overview of the political, economic, and international circumstances of this decade. It then looks at how workers in different positions in the urban exclusion system, particularly precarious workers, protested to improve their conditions, and how these protests were quashed by the government. This is followed by an examination of how gains won from temporary workers’ protests – most importantly, the largest-scale regularization in the Mao era – were carried out in 1971 and 1972, and why temporary employment rebounded thereafter.

The final chapter looks at how Sino-North Korean relations changed after the Cold War. Both sides continued to find the idea of Sino-North Korean friendship useful even as they went in very different political and cultural directions during the 1970s and 1980s.

The Introduction provides background on Iran and on the author, including the motivations for the book and the writing process. The book is based on ten years of fieldwork in Iran conducted from the 1990s until 2007; the Introduction explains how a study of the politics of daily life became the prism for inquiring into contemporary issues of power, freedom, and agency. For nonspecialist readers, an overview of Iran’s twentieth-century political and social history offers context. For all readers, the chapter offers a case study of an interpretative method, centered on the experience of watching an Iranian film in Chicago, and speaking about it with Iranian women in Tehran.

Not only did the institutional genes of the Chinese imperial system facilitate the transplantation of totalitarianism from Soviet Russia to China, but they also guided China’s divergence into regionally administered totalitarianism (RADT), which localized and enhanced the adaptability of the Chinese Communist system. Chapter 12 traces the inception and entrenchment of RADT in China. It begins with the Anti-Rightist Movement that established the foundation for a divergence from the Soviet model by instituting a national reign of terror. The transition to RADT began with the Great Leap Forward, when poorly conceived regional competition, characteristic of the RADT regime, precipitated the Great Famine within the nascent People’s Commune system. The Cultural Revolution further entrenched the RADT regime, allowing it to establish its roots firmly within the Chinese political landscape.

The Cold War divided East Asia. Beginning around 1978, the communist People’s Republic of China implemented market-based reforms that unleashed spectacular economic takeoff, but which were not accompanied by corresponding political reforms. After a bloody war, Korea has remained divided between an impoverished and isolationistic communist regime in the north and the non-communist south. Japan’s postwar “developmental state” economy boomed, and by 1981 Japan had become the world’s largest automaker. Trade wars with the U.S. led to a sharp increase in the exchange value of the yen, however, and the bursting of the Japanese bubble economy in 1990. In Vietnam, after the defeat and withdrawal of French colonial forces, massive American military intervention in support of the non-communist south became deeply controversial. Eventually the U.S. disengaged, and Vietnam was reunified by communist northern forces in 1975. The Cold War therefore ended, somewhat surprisingly, with communist regimes still entrenched in East Asia in mainland China, Vietnam, and North Korea.

Once the totalitarian regime is established, various disasters are bound to recur. A totalitarian state is diagonally opposite to liberal democracy, which is characterized by prevalence of horizontal connections, the sum total of which constitute a social contract. An ideal totalitarian structure, to the contrary, is like a zero-impedance conductor: orders flow from the top to the lowest level all without any obstacle. It was this totalitarian system that enabled Mao, the charismatic leader, to use his overwhelming social support to overthrow his political rivals within the system when his authority was weakened. Like a courtly struggle, the Cultural Revolution was for the sake of Mao’s personal power, but the cost of social destruction was incomparably greater.

This chapter delves into Mao’s endeavors to reconfigure socialist industrialization from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s. Amid waning Sino–Soviet relations, Mao criticized Soviet-style centralized planning and advocated decentralization during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961). This policy shift granted local officials increased horizontal control over major state-owned enterprises (SOEs), such as Angang. Following the Great Leap Forward’s collapse, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) constructed new industrial SOEs within inland “Third Front” regions as a bulwark against potential American and Soviet attacks, thereby reducing resource allocation for Angang and Manchuria. Commencing in 1966, the Cultural Revolution further decentralized power from nationally-owned SOEs such as Angang to local CCP cadres and military forces. Despite these attempts to deviate from the Soviet model, these efforts still preserved essential aspects of socialist industrialization. Nevertheless, the Sino–US rapprochement of 1972 presented China with the prospect of integration into the US-led capitalist global economy.

The new dynamics on the border epitomize how the escalation of the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution compounded the already wobbly state building campaign at the border. During the decade from 1965 to 1975, the war and the chaotic sociopolitical movement militarized the Sino-Vietnamese border and made this far-off region more relevant to the decision-making in Beijing and Hanoi about their internal power struggles and national security policies. Yet, these developments also shifted state-society relations on the political periphery in favor of a more porous boundary. Thus, the extension and contraction of state power took place simultaneously. Both Chinese and Vietnamese authorities launched ambitious infrastructure projects in the border area to facilitate the transportation of aid to Vietnam and mobilized the local society against the possible expansion of the war. The Sino-Vietnamese land and maritime border region, as well as the transportation lines running through it, became spaces of frequent interactions between the Chinese and Vietnamese officials regarding the provision of aid and the coordination of border defenses. The efficiency of these interactions, however, was increasingly susceptible to the decline of the Sino-Vietnamese partnership following the Tết Offensive and the start of negotiations between Hanoi and Washington in 1968.