Prior to the onset of the Cultural Revolution, few analysts of the Asian scene had the prescience to perceive even the outline of the impending cataclysm. So universal was this failure that weeks were to pass before articles began to appear giving hindsight analysis concerning the surprising development of events. Even these reports often failed to grasp how completely the maelstrom had seized in its grasp both the Communist Party and some of its most eminent leaders.

Shansi-Chahar-Hopei was one of the largest of the Chinese Communist areas during the war against Japan and was the only one of the areas behind the Japanese lines to receive some sort of recognition from the National Government. (Its boundaries were the Tat'ung–T'aiyuan railway on the west and T'aiyuan–Shihchiachuang–Techow railway lines in the south and it extended into Jehol and Liaoning in the north. The population under its control may have reached 20 millions.) In its general level of administration, Shansi-Chahar-Hopei was probably the most advanced of the Communist wartime areas. Its government had started the earliest, at the beginning of 1938, and it was able to develop with less Kuomintang-Communist friction than other areas. It had more than the average proportion of educated officials since, as it adjoined the Peiping-Tientsin area, students or other intellectuals who decided to leave the occupied areas to take part in anti-Japanese work were most likely to come to Shansi-Chahar-Hopei. And, while much of the mountain base area west of the P'ing-Han railway was very primitive, Central Hopei had reached a fairly high level of economic and social development before 1937.

China's economic leadership was profoundly affected by the Cultural Revolution. As members of the governing bureaucracy and, all but a tiny group, members also of the Communist Party, economic officials were among the prime targets of Mao Tse-tung's drive to de-bureau-cratize the Party and the entire Chinese administrative system. Almost half of them were attacked during the three years the revolution raged. Some of these men retained their positions, but most appear to have been purged.

In the Cultural Revolution, the task of dismantling and reorganizing the Communist Party has not spared the various youth organizations that operated under the Party's aegis. Mao's injunction to “bombard” the bourgeois central headquarters within the Party has involved a similar bombardment of lesser headquarters in dependent establishments. Just as the Party organization was by-passed in the formation of rebel committees, so Communist youth organizations have been subsumed or swamped in the Red Guard movement. The Youth League in particular, as the Party's “main assistant,” has shared its fate.

Educational reform has been one of the important issues raised during the Cultural Revolution, not merely because it belongs to the realm of culture but, more important, because it bears on the question of “cultivating revolutionary successors” and on the shaping of the whole future of China. Anyone seizing power wishes to keep it for a certain length of time; it is however a special feature of people's revolutions to set their goals on the prospect of a boundless future. In this regard, gaining power in education is not simply one side of the struggle for actual total power (mastering the “superstructure” as well as the “structure”) it is the guarantee of everlasting rule, on the assumption that the mind is ultimately the only thing man can rely upon and which is entirely within his grasp. As one slogan puts it: “The earth may shake, heaven may fall, but we shall ever be faithful to Chairman Mao.”