This paper analyses Mao's revolutionary strategy as revealed in the Cultural Revolution. Defined as an analysis of ends and means, strategy stands between objective reality and action, linking one event to another in a chain of social causation. Since one's attitudes and ideology influence one's definition of the situation and one's selection of means and goals, these subjective elements constitute a large part of any strategy. This study of Mao's strategy therefore raises the following questions: what was Mao's role in the Cultural Revolution; what faults did he attribute to the pre-Cultural Revolution Chinese political system; what were his objectives in the Cultural Revolution; how did he actually lead themovement; and was there any discernible pattern in his leadership?

Mao's Role in the Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution was certainly one of the most complex political events in the entire history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It involved a large segmentof the general population and all ruling groups, both the government and the Party, from the Central Committee down to Party branches in the schools and factories. Moreover, a wide varietyof issues were raised, discussed and debated: broad ideological and political questions and more specific questions of economic, cultural and educational policy. To complicate matters further, the mass movement lasted more than two years, passing through a number of different stages. At each stage, new political groups emerged, leading groups changed, and tactics shifted, only to produce a new configuration in the next stage. Each stage, therefore, exhibited its ownunique features in terms of the dominant actors, issues and coalitions, and each stage forced the individual actor to reconsider his choice of tactics and coalition partners.

In writing a biography of Agnes Smedley (1892–1950), the writer-activist and long-time friend of China, the need to collect materials in China is obvious. In March of last year co-biographer Jan MacKinnon, myself and our two children arrived in Peking for a month of research work on Agnes Smedley. Our purpose was to examine archival materials (papers and possessions which were sent to Peking with her remains after her death in England) and to interview Chinese comrades who knew and worked with her in the 1930s and 1940s. Our host organization (although we were economically self-supporting) was the Chinese Association for Friendly Relations with Foreign Countries. Beforehand they had checked on the feasibility of what we wanted to do and thereafter were enormously helpful in facilitating all aspects of our work. It was they who were most responsible for the success of our trip. In the course of three weeks in Peking and a further four days in Shanghai, we conducted long interviews with 13 Chinese comrades of Smedley, and examined in detail the relevant holdings of three history museums and one library.

“The reorganized Kuomintang [of 1927] established itself on a new social base – the Shanghai bankers, the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie of the cities, and the landlords in the country.” Such was the view of the allegedly leftist editor Frederick Spencer writing in 1934, and his opinion has been shared by writers of a variety of political persuasions and backgrounds. T. A. Bisson, a research associate for the Foreign Policy Association, observed in 1933 that the Nanking regime's “most powerful supporters have been the Shanghai bankers.” Robert W. Barnett, writing in 1941 for the Institute of Pacific Relations, argued that after 1927 “a progressive but anti-revolutionary Chinese bourgeoisie provided the ruling Kuomintang with its principal source of inspiration and support.” Ch'en Po-ta wrote that the Nanking regime was “a counter-revolutionary military dictatorship of the big compradors and big landlords. It was formed with the Shanghai, or the ‘Kiangsu-Chekiang,’ gangster ring of comprador–financiers at its core.”

Tibet in 1950 was an isolated, working theocracy, possibly unique among the various political systems of the modern world. She might earlier have been colonized by Britain had the prospect been economically attractive. Instead she was doomed as a result of conflicting British, Chinese and Russian imperialist interests in Central Asia and the manoeuvrings arising therefrom to a virtually complete isolation, reinforcing the natural mountain-bound isolation of her geography. Both the Anglo-Tibetan Convention of 1904 and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 were basically aimed at making Tibet an area free from any struggle for spheres of influence and colonization. In so doing, they indirectly denied Tibet any alternative source of social change.