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2. Michael, Franz, “The struggle for power,” Problems of Communism, Vol. XVI, No. 3 (05–06 1967), pp. 12–21Google Scholar. This paper is an excellent early source of information on the development of the Cultural Revolution.

3. Hiniker, Paul J., Revolutionary Ideology and Chinese Reality: Dissonance Under Mao (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1977), p. 275Google Scholar. This book contains a more thorough treatment of the dissonance reduction thesis advanced in this paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 87th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in New York, 1 September 1979.

4. For a balanced historical account of the era, see Bridgham, Phillip, “Mao's Cultural Revolution: the struggle to consolidate power,” The China Quarterly, No. 41 (01–03 1970), p. 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), Daily Report: People's Republic of China (1 07 1981)Google Scholar, “Full text of Party resolution on historical questions” Beijing, 30 June (Xinhua). See also “Resolution on questions in Party history since 1949,” Beijing Review, No. 27 (6 07 1981), pp. 10–39Google Scholar.

6. Festinger, Leon, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Evanston, Illinois: Row Peterson, 1957)Google Scholar.

7. Michael, , “The struggle for power,” pp. 12–21Google Scholar.

8. Ibid. p. 18.

9. Ibid. p. 21.

10. Ibid. p.19.

11. Ibid. p. 20.

12. For an interesting example of a deductive power theory which has been applied broadly to Chinese politics see Skinner, G. W. and Winckler, E. “Compliance secession in rural communist China: a cyclical theory,” in Etzoni, A. (ed.), Complex Organizations: a Sociological Reader (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969)Google Scholar. For further applications of this theory, see Townsend, J., Politics in China (Boston: Little Brown, 1974)Google Scholar. For a seminal general model stressing rewards, coercion, expertise, affection and legitimacy as bases of power, see French, John R. P. Jr, “A formal theory of social power,” The Psychological Review, No. 63 (1956), pp. 181–94CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

13. Snow, Edgar, The Long Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1971), p. 169Google Scholar. For one interesting set of observations on the ageing process and how it relates to Mao's “inflexible” behaviour in the Cultural Revolution see, Post, Jerrold M., “On aging leaders,” Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, Vol. VI, No. 1 (1973), pp. 114–18Google Scholar.

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15. FBIS, 7 January 1981, p. K-18.

16. Renmin ribao, June 1966.

17. “Lin Biao's address at the enlarged meeting of the CCP Central Politburo (18 May, 1966),” Issues and Studies, Vol. VI, No. 5 (02 1970), p. 92Google Scholar.

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20. ibid. p. K-14.

21. For a brilliant analysis of the Great Leap as a dialectically reasoned embodiment of the thought of Mao Zedong, see Schurmann, Franz, Ideology and Organization in Communist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 73–104Google Scholar.

22. Renminribao, 1 October 1958.

23. FBIS, 7 January 1981, K–13.

24. The economic failures of the Great Leap were reported by Peng Dehuai at the Lushan Plenum. Agriculture nose-dived in 1959 and industry in 1961. Prominent western economists have assessed the Leap as an economic fiasco. Robert Michael Field estimates it cost China a full decade of industrial growth; Alexander Eckstein gives the same estimate; Lui estimates that a total of seven years growth, from 1958–65, was completely lost. See Field, Robert M., “Chinese communist industrial production,” in Joint Economic Commission (JEC) of the U.S. Congress, An Economic Profile of Mainland China (New York: Praeger, 1968), p. 285Google Scholar; Eckstein, Alexander, Communist China's Economic Growth and Foreign Trade (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966), p. 85Google Scholar; Ta-Chung, Liu, “The tempo of economic growth on the Chinese mainland, 1949–65,” in JEC, An Economic Profile, p. 53Google Scholar. For a quantitative analysis of the Great Leap style of development see Hiniker, Paul J. and Farace, R. Vincent, “Approaches to national development in China: 1949–58,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 18, No. 1 (10 1969), pp. 51–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. The empirical scaling of individual Politburo members' commitment to Maoist ideology involved a nine-item behavioural scale and resulted in a coefficient of unidimensionality measuring inter-item correlations at 0·70. An individual's score on the commitment scale correlated 0·90 with not being purged in the Cultural Revolution. For further information of the scaling of commitment, see Hiniker's, Revolutionary Ideology and Chinese Reality, pp. 307–313Google Scholar.

26. Chinese Law and Government (White Plains, New York: International Arts and Sciences Press), Vol. 1, No. 4 (Winter 1968), pp. 73–74Google Scholar.

27. Ibid. p. 53.

28. Ibid. p. 53.

29. Ibid. pp. 79–84.

30. Ten Glorious Years (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1960), pp. 253–54Google Scholar.

31. Miscellany of Mao Tse-tung Thought, p. 262.

32. Ibid. p. 266.

33. See Feng, Lin “The tasks of China's Cultural Revolution,” Peking Review, Vol. 3, No. 25 (21 06 1960), pp. 14–19Google Scholar; and No. 26 (28 June 1960), pp. 19–25.

34. Goldman, Merle, “The unique blooming and contending of 1961–62,” CQ, No. 37, p. 59Google Scholar.

35. See Cheng, J.Chester (ed.), The Politics of the Chinese Red Army: A Translation of the Bulletin of Activities of the PLA (Palo Alto, California: Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, 1966)Google Scholar, No. 3, 1960, No. 1, 1961, and No. 2, 1961. See also Gittings, JohnThe Role of the Chinese Army (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 245, 249, 254Google Scholar.

36. Among the highly committed Politburo members r_ab=0·97 and the regression equation is an a = 1·1 + 2·1 b where “a” is the increased number of articles published after the failure and “b” is the number of articles published before the failure. Among the less committed r_ab = –0·61 and the slope of the regression line changes direction yielding a=0·8–1·2b.

37. FBIS, 7 January 1981, p. K–13.

38. Issues and Studies, Vol. 2, No. 8 (05 1966), pp. 58–59Google Scholar.

39. Chen, C. S. and Ridley, C. P., Rural People's Communes in Lien-chiang (Palo Alto, California: Hoover Institute, 1969), p. 81Google Scholar.

40. FBIS, 7 January 1981, p. K–13.

41. Ibid.

42. Hiniker, , Revolutionary Ideology and Chinese Reality, pp. 183–88Google Scholar.

43. Ibid. pp. 229–47. For further analysis based upon scaling and content analysis of People's Daily, see Hiniker, Paul and Perlstein, Jolanta J., “Alteration of charismatic and bureaucratic styles of leadership in Communist China,” Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4, 01 1978CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44. Gelman, Harry, “Mao and the permanent purge,” Problems of Communism (11–12 1966), pp. 2–14Google Scholar. By the summer of 1979 all the prominent figures purged early in the Cultural Revolution, with the sole exception of Liu Shaoqi, had been rehabilitated, at least to the level of government posts: Lo Ruiqing was re-elected to the Central Committee; Yang Xianzhen, author of the “Two-combine-into-one” heresy, was made an adviser to the Higher Party School; Zhou Yang was made head of the All-China Federation of Art and Literature; Wu Han, Deng Tuo and Liao Mosha, members of the literary “Three family village” who had satirized the Leap in the early 1960s, were all rehabilitated, the two first mentioned posthumously; even Liu Shaoqi's widow, Wang Guangmei, was made a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

45. Renmin ribao, 3 January 1969.

46. See Hiniker, , Revolutionary Ideology and Chinese Reality, pp. 307–314Google Scholar. See also Kiesler, Charles, The Psychology of Commitment (New York: Academic Press, 1971), pp. 25–33Google Scholar. The nine items selected do, indeed, form a unidimensional scale: the average item to total scale correlation is 0·70; the average inter-item correlation is also high, π/π max = 0·69. When subjected to Guttman scale analysis to test the ordinality of the nine items along the commitment dimension, they yield a coefficient of reproducibility of 0·94. In a perfect scale, the responses of a subject to all of the items can be reproduced from knowledge of his rank position alone; in our commitment scale, 94% of the responses of the 23 Politburo members can be reproduced from knowledge of the member's rank alone. This implies that a member who ranked low, e.g. Deng Xiaoping, practically never endorsed an item not also endorsed by a higher ranking individual such as Liu Shaoqi; and similarly Liu practically never endorsed an item not also endorsed by an even higher ranking member such as Lin Biao. See Torgerson, Warren S.Theory and Methods of Scaling (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1967), pp. 307–331Google Scholar.

47. For evidence on the abortive attempts to revive the people's communes during the Cultural Revolution, see the following sources: Kwangtung Provincial Party Committee, “The 10 great measures for the implementation of Chairman Mao's instructions (13 August 1966),” excerpted in “Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation, CQ, No. 28 (10–12 1966), pp. 174–77Google Scholar; Washenko, Steve, “Agriculture in mainland China –1968,” Current Scene, Vol. VII, No. 6 (31 03 1969), p. 3Google Scholar; MacDougall, Colina, “The Cultural Revolution in the communes: back to 1958?” Current Scene, Vol. VII, No. 7 (11 04 1969), p. 4Google Scholar; “China's economy in 1969: policy, agriculture, industry, foreign trade,” Current Scene, Vol. VIII, No. 11 (1 06 1970), pp. 1–17Google Scholar; Ke-Chaun, Han, “Recent developments in rural communes on the Chinese mainland,” Issues and Studies (05 1969), p. 6Google Scholar; and Tieh-min, Li, “The people's commune: focal point of resistance to the Cultural Revolution,” Issues and Studies, Vol. VI, No. 1 (10 1969), pp. 43–52Google Scholar.

48. Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Free Press, 1964), esp. pp. 324–406Google Scholar on the types of authority.

49. Black, Cyril E., The Dynamics of Modernization (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), pp. 1–100Google Scholar. See also Almond, Gabriel and Powell, G. Bingham, Comparative Politics: A Development Approach (Boston, Little Brown, 1966)Google Scholar. As applied to China, see Schwartz, Benjamin, “Modernization and the Maoist vision,” MacFarquhar, Roderick (ed.) China Under Mao (Cambridge: MIT Press), pp. 3–19Google Scholar.

50. Hirshman, Albert O., Exit, Voice and Loyalty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 93–95Google Scholar.

51. Ibid. p. 95. See also the perceptive article by Kolakowski, Leszek in Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977)Google Scholar.

52. Brinton, Crane, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1965), esp. pp. 122, 132Google Scholar.

53. Ibid. p. 122.

54. Ibid. pp. 235–36.