'The revolution will not be televised': the institutional

This article was downloaded by: [City University of Hong Kong Library] On: 18 June 2015, At: 21:52 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Political Power Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpow21

‘The revolution will not be televised’: the institutional work of radical change in China’s Cultural Revolution a

b

c

Andrew Chan , Stewart Clegg , Miguel Pina e Cunha & Arménio d

Rego a

Department of Management, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong b

Click for updates

Management Discipline Group, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia; Executive Director, Centre for Management and Organization Studies, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia; Visiting Professor, Organizational Theory and Behavior, Nova School of Business and Economics, Lisbon, Portugal; Visiting Professor, Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle, UK. c

Organizational Theory and Behavior, Nova School of Business and Economics, Lisbon, Portugal d

Department of Economics, Management and Industrial Engineering, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal Published online: 02 Mar 2015.

To cite this article: Andrew Chan, Stewart Clegg, Miguel Pina e Cunha & Arménio Rego (2015) ‘The revolution will not be televised’: the institutional work of radical change in China’s Cultural Revolution, Journal of Political Power, 8:1, 61-83, DOI: 10.1080/2158379X.2015.1011377 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2015.1011377

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or

howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

Downloaded by [City University of Hong Kong Library] at 21:52 18 June 2015

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions

Journal of Political Power, 2015 Vol. 8, No. 1, 61–83, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2015.1011377

‘The revolution will not be televised’: the institutional work of radical change in China’s Cultural Revolution


Andrew Chana, Stewart Cleggb*, Miguel Pina e Cunhac and Arménio Regod a Department of Management, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; bManagement Discipline Group, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia; Executive Director, Centre for Management and Organization Studies, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia; Visiting Professor, Organizational Theory and Behavior, Nova School of Business and Economics, Lisbon, Portugal; Visiting Professor, Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle, UK; cOrganizational Theory and Behavior, Nova School of Business and Economics, Lisbon, Portugal; dDepartment of Economics, Management and Industrial Engineering, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

Mao Zedong sought both to destabilize existing institutional categories for ordering meaning, and impose new ones, initially through the Great Leap Forward and subsequently during the Cultural Revolution. The paper explores the institutional work that made this process of radical change possible. At its core was the construction and deployment of a set of binary categorization devices. These are explored in the paper to argue that persistent and morally sophisticated institutional work is necessary to make radical change possible. Macro, meso and micro processes of institutional work operate in parallel, reinforcing each other and articulating utopian desire with local possibility. There is no single revolutionary event, no central scene to be represented. Together, leaders and followers at several levels participate in the processes of categorizing and managing the result of such categorizations. Categorizations of radical change have explicitly stigmatizing purposes and managing categorization/stigmatization is an important institutional work, instrumental for radical change. Keywords: Cultural Revolution; cult of personality; Mao Zedong; institutional work; categorization

1. Introduction The Cultural Revolution is one of those episodes that the farther we move from it in historical terms, the harder it seems to be to understand quite what it was and what its effects were. The Cultural Revolution in China occurred between 1966 and 1976, ending when the ‘Gang of Four’ was arrested (Hinton et al. 2003).1 It was a period of seemingly collective hysteria, inflamed by a real purge against those who were opposing Mao. Viewed today, informed by the iconography of rampant Chinese capitalism, it seems to confirm the view that the past is another country. During this period, gangs of youthful Red Guards, instigated by Mao and his entourage, moved through local communities denouncing (as well as torturing and *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] The title comes from the rap pioneer, Gil Scott-Heron (1970): in his usage the stress is on the necessity of changing everyday patterns – if revolutionary change is to occur, changes that are beneath the threshold of dramatic events but are deep processes of change must occur – much as Cultural Revolution sought to be. © 2015 Taylor & Francis


62

A. Chan et al.

killing) those constituted as enemies of Maoist thought. They aimed to ‘protect’ Mao, to strike Mao’s enemies and to achieve Maoist endeavours such as ‘stuffing’ human feelings (Chang and Halliday 2007) – some of these same people, it should be noted, are now leading lights in capitalist revolution. In this contribution, we shall deal with the history of that era and try to put its excesses into a historical frame. We are not interested merely in the history, however. We are, after all, organization theorists. What on earth do these obscure events have to do with organization theory? We start from the premise that the Chinese Cultural Revolution is one of the more important ‘naturally occurring’ (Silverman 2013) experiments of large-scale institutional change in the twentieth-century. It has been the object of some spirited debate in the organization theory community in the past (Shenkar 1984, 1989, Clegg and Higgins 1989). However, while it has been debated in terms of the meaning of Mao’s attack on bureaucracy, it has not been subsequently interrogated for its resonances in the work of contemporary management theorists. That this should be the case is surprising because, while the Cultural Revolution may have been eschewed as a political strategy in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the idea that exhortation and moral leadership can create ‘cultural revolution’ (albeit usually without the associated physical violence and coercion) remains a central organizational strategy, as Clegg et al. (2011) argue. The present paper concentrates on the Cultural Revolution from an organizational and power perspective and asks how it was possible to create the institutional infrastructure that triggered mass killing, extending a model developed by Clegg et al. (2006) for analysis of total institutions. We will investigate how a cult of personality develops, with what purpose, supported by explicit institutional work (Phillips and Lawrence 2012), whose images were purposive, intended and effortful (Lawrence et al. 2009). In other words, the paper addresses the (continuing) cult of personality(still represented by the placement of Mao’s portrait at Tiananmen Gate and his embalmed body in the Mausoleum at Tiananmen Square) that inspired the Cultural Revolution (Table 1). A great deal of institutional work prepared the field for the continuing memorialization of Mao, especially in the Cultural Revolution. The Little Red Book of quotations from Mao Zedong (one of the most printed books in history) was delivered to every Chinese citizen to learn from its example and brandish it at every public event. Almost five billion badges with Mao’s portrait were manufactured. The cult of personality and the concomitant direct flow between the leader and the masses Table 1. Mao’s eight great lessons. (1) The idea of permanent revolution. (2) Learning from the masses. (3) Champion workers fuelled by Mao Zedong thought to exceed production and harvest targets. (4) Learning from the masses. (5) Value driven rationality – the overwhelming superiority of Mao Zedong thought applied through Red Guards leading the masses. (6) The emphasis on communal principles as the basis of organization. (7) The attack against bureaucracy – Mao’s 20 lessons on bureaucracy in The Little Red Book; as Mao said in criticism of the Soviet model, ‘Why does heavy industry need so many rules and regulations?’ (8) Chairman Mao thought provides the central values coupled with the autonomy of the local, communal level Red Guards to implement that thought.


Journal of Political Power

63

emptied out several ‘old’ institutions (such as the law, including the Constitution) and allowed Mao to pursue his proposals through a strategy of terror, from which several members of his entourage did not escape alive. We seek to translate previous work in the fields of political science and historical analysis to organization theory. In this sense, our investigation consists in building on previous work to study unexamined views of a phenomenon of interest; in this case, how institutional research can inform the ways in which large-scale social changes might be triggered and organized. Our research addresses how institutional processes at different levels operate to make mass killing a reality, as a way of disseminating and perpetuating leadership in power. We specifically focus on the role of the state and of institutional work in this process. We respond to Owens et al.’s (2013) call to conduct studies of genocide with a focus on linkages at different levels of analysis. We explicitly consider the role of institutional work at the meso level, as a form of articulating better-known macro- and micro-level processes. 2. Method We depart from previous research that revealed the institutional processes involved in the creation of oppression as a continuous process, involving several types of work, namely institutional work, defined as ‘purposive action (…) aimed at creating, maintaining and disrupting institutions’ (Lawrence and Suddaby 2006, p. 215). The institutional conditions for oppression constitute an important but still underexamined theme in organization studies (Lawrence et al. 2013). We conducted a documentary analysis of work on the Chinese Revolution using text as our material. The use of published documents as sources of work has a long tradition in the social and organizational sciences and is prevalent in studies of mass violence, for obvious reasons (Owens et al. 2013). It is an often-necessary approach when studying historical events. We used secondary sources to study micro–meso–macro articulation. As Owens et al. (2013, p. 73) pointed out, ‘meso- and micro-level processes have received far less attention [than macro-processes] and are thus in need of further empirical study’. We proceeded by ‘analytically disaggregating’ (Owens et al. 2013, p. 73) a number of core processes from the case in order to build hypotheses about the possible connections between levels of analysis. We centred on processes that could highlight a range of macro to micro interactions, but do not claim that our choices exhaustively capture the complexity of mass killing. We are also aware that secondary historical materials could be complemented by other sources; however, revisiting published sources with an alternative theoretical lens can extend theory dealing with mass violence. The paucity of research on the topic by organization scholars makes our contribution more valuable. We thus hope that our organizational analysis of the case will contribute to the theorizing of mass killing as an organizational phenomenon involving substantial institutional work (Phillips and Lawrence 2012). Research on such evil work is still scarce (e.g. Clegg 2006, Stokes and Gabriel 2010). 3. Framing the Cultural Revolution 3.1. Making efficient violence possible Clegg et al. (2006) suggest a framework for analysing the power maps of a total institution. First, there should be a strong leader, to whom is owed unquestioned

64

A. Chan et al.


obedience, who has monopoly control of organizational apparatuses. Second, that there should be a condition of organizational rationality in which actions that enact the organizational action in question become highly routine. Third, that action should be oriented towards dehumanized objects of action – it is much easier to act with extreme prejudice towards those who are the victims of the action or the subjects of power, when they are dehumanized (Haslam 2006, Zimbardo 2007). Together with concerted ‘power over’ those subjugated, these conditions make ‘efficient violence possible’ (Clegg et al. 2006, p. 161). Such violence may be actual or symbolic – or both, as the following event suggests (Chang and Halliday 2007, p. 628): A leading perpetrator of atrocities in the girls’ school where the headmistress had just been killed was given the signal honor of putting a Red Guard armband on Mao. The dialogue that followed was made public: ‘Chairman Mao asked her: ‘What’s your name?’ She said ‘Song Bin-bin’. Chairman Mao asked: ‘Is it the Bin’ as in ‘Educated and Gentle?’. She said: ‘Yes’. Chairman Mao said: ‘Be violent!’ Song Bin-bin changed her name to ‘Be Violent’, and her school changed its name to ‘The Red Violent School’. Atrocities now multiplied in schools and universities.

Violence, whether symbolic or physical, is something done to others, irrespective of their views, by those in specific circumstances who are able to command and mobilize resources. Authoritative violence – that which claims its legitimation from some overarching social symbolism – minimizes the scope of resistant agency on the part of these others. Within institutionalized forms of discourse, some representations more readily achieve authoritative dominance. Symbolic violence, for instance, frequently operates through the normalization and acceptance of dominant categories, those widely regarded as representationally valid. Sacks (1992, p. 338) demonstrated that membership categorization is a central strategy in power relations. Identities can be established through the use of various stigmatizing ‘membership categorization devices’ (Sacks 1972, 1992, Sudnow 1972), which discursively connect specific semiotic symbols and meanings with specific categories of persons. Some representations become fixed in usage, are normalized, become a common currency of thought and conceptualization. Clegg et al. (2006) noted such categorization as a part of the process of the Holocaust. Members’ categorization devices routinely produce binary labels. During the Cultural Revolution, binary labels were widely used to describe groups in positive or negative terms. Positive terms used included ‘cadres’ or ‘proletarians’, as these were positively inspired by Mao Zedong Thought, while negative terms included ‘rightists’, ‘bourgeoisie’, ‘capitalist roaders’ or those who were ‘deviationists’, all terms of stigmatization in Mao Zedong Thought. These labels were categorization devices that became widely used by members of the Red Guards and associated politicians, a usage that became widely known and understood throughout the PRC. These labels designated and helped to constitute positively and negatively ascribed status groups. The positively valourized categories were created through group consciousness, in which there was a sense of shared interests; those negatively valued shared a consciousness of exclusion and stigmatization by virtue of the labels attached to them. (Often these labels were physically attached to the personage, with the hapless victims publically paraded wearing a poster slung round their neck festooned with characters that labelled their crime.) People seeking advancement in terms of the Maoist system of meanings sought asylum in certain



65

preferential labels, and found excuses for excluding or eradicating those whom they labelled as outcasts as non-members of the preferred categorization device and assigned them as members defined by devices deemed deviant. While the use of binary categorization devices was a central tool of the Cultural Revolution, another core strategy was the use of official campaigns to gain mass compliance. Official campaigns legitimated the use of both real and symbolic violence to frighten citizens into compliance with state policies. ‘Killing chickens to scare monkeys’, as it became known, was normal workday policy by August 1966, when a relaxation of police control (sanctioned by central order) allowed many new groups and individuals to engage in conflict with each other. Sometimes, this took the form of a clash of symbols, as accusations were hurled to stigmatize individuals; other times the violence was physical. Random violence occurred daily and regularly, including students’ violence against teachers and school leaders (Chang and Halliday 2007), simulating conditions of anarchy. The effect of unpredictable and random applications of violence was to increase ordinary non-stigmatized members’ identification with the dominant symbols and categorization devices as icons of protective authority. Finally, as in the most significant total institutions of the twentieth-century, the Cultural Revolution confined stigmatized people against their will, as well as abusing their status, dignity and bodies. 3.2. Prelude to the Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution was, in some respects, a shadow play, with much refraction on many surfaces. At one level, it was an inspirational movement of young people, fired by Mao Zedong Thought, which sought to institutionalize Chairman Mao’s ideas of permanent revolution within the PRC. At another level it was a deadly power struggle played out between Mao and his rivals in the Party. The disastrous Great Leap Forward,2 initiated by Mao in 1958 as a policy that developed a multitude of small furnaces at many local levels to smelt metals, had weakened Mao’s credibility, due to its disastrous results. These results included the production of a plethora of substandard and shoddy metal; the devastation of the natural environment, as trees were consumed in the furnaces; subsequent soil degradation, because the cover that retained water had been destroyed with the devastation of foliage, and widespread food shortages as well as mass starvation because the labour force was diverted from productive agrarian activities. The latter two factors led to significant calorific shortfalls, as crop production deteriorated. Starvation and deaths on a large scale were the consequence, although they were not officially reported; in fact, throughout the period of the Great Leap Forward (from 1958 to 1960), record harvests were reported even though the reality was quite different. Commitment to revolutionary rhetoric and fervour, as well as a canny regard for self-interest required the fudging of statistics sent to the Party. The social construction of reality presented to the Party was belied by everyday experience in the communes. Based on the success of the social construction – but not the harvests – the Party increased the surpluses that it demanded from the communes for the towns and for export. However, in 1959 and 1960, inclement weather meant that many provinces experienced severe famine (Dikotter 2010, Jisheng 2012). In 1960, drought and other bad weather affected 55% of cultivated land, while an estimated 60% of northern agricultural land received no rain at all. Many millions of people perished in this episode; estimates vary between about 14 and 43 million. Only in


66

A. Chan et al.

1961, was it admitted that social construction and agrarian production were out of kilter and that grains were being imported. Liu Shaoqi, Vice Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and President of the PRC, blamed the outcomes not only on inclement weather but also on incompetent policies. In consequence, Mao stepped down as State Chairman of the PRC in 1959, though he did retain his position as Chairman of the CCP. In April 1959, Liu Shaoqi succeeded Mao as head of state, favouring a more moderate development strategy (a procedure that made him vulnerable to subsequent Maoist attack, orchestrated through mass demonstrations that suggested that demands for Liu’s fall was a response to popular will). Partly in consequence of the Great Leap Forward’s negative results, Mao responded by launching a campaign to rid China of its ‘liberal bourgeoisie’ elements in order to maintain revolutionary class struggle. In this way, he sought to maintain the image of himself as a charismatic leader with a popular base at many local levels, despite the failure of the Great Leap Forward. Neither the last nor the first leader to do so, he appealed over the heads of ‘the bureaucracy’ to ‘the people’. In doing so, as the categories indicate, profoundly ideological work was afoot because these binary categories, each seemingly unitary, glossed a much more complex, ambiguous and fragmentary reality. 3.3. The Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution occurred at a time when Mao’s authority as the Chairman of the Party and ruler of China was being questioned. Although open attacks on the Party were out of the question, historical allusions were used to voice opposition (Chang 2003). According to Chang (2003, p. 273), herself a former Red Guard whose parents were important Party officials, ‘even apparently esoteric allusions were widely understood as coded references’ to criticize the regime and its leaders. Thus, Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing, who had been an actress in the 1930s, decreed that historical themes were being used in cultural productions against the regime and Mao himself. As a consequence, in April 1963, Mao banned all ‘Ghost Dramas’. To him, the ghost avengers represented in such genre (where dead victims’ spirits seek revenge on those who had persecuted them) were ‘uncomfortably close to the class enemies who had perished under his rule’ (Chang 2003, p. 273). Soon after, Mao and his wife turned their attention to other genres. ‘Witch-hunts’ started against writers, artists, teachers and scholars – all labelled as ‘“reactionary bourgeois authorities”, a new category of class enemies’, who deserved to be attacked, humiliated and killed (Chang 2003, p. 274: the reader should also consult Benton and Chun [2010] for a contrary and more positive view of Mao.). After the failure of the Great Leap Forward, while Mao did not actually steer events, he was still celebrated as the Great Helmsman. In November 1965, Mao was ready to launch the great purge he had long been planning to ‘punish this Party of ours’, as he put it, for slighting his role (Chang and Halliday 2007, p. 611). Mao gave the leadership task to his wife Jiang Qing and Defence Minister Lin Biao. Jiang Qing had been assigned to the Ministry of Culture in 1963. With Lin Biao’s blessing, in January 1966, she began to work on a highly critical review of ‘struggle’ in China in the literary and arts field since 1949. The text was approved by Mao and released as an intra-party document in April 1966; it concluded that a socialist revolution on the cultural front had to be launched. On 14



67

April 1966, Madam Mao’s ‘kill culture’ manifesto was made public (Chang and Halliday 2007, p. 620). Non-revolutionary art was not to be tolerated (although Mao and his entourage were to enjoy the cultural fruits of the plunder, using old books to coat the room where Nixon was received, thus creating positive impressions with the Americans). For instance, at the height of Madam Mao’s influence all but four operas were banned as decadent and anti-socialist (although Mao had continued to order opera performances for himself, in private). The Cultural Revolution, which Mao unleashed in August 1966, was an attempt to regain a general political ascendancy through ‘Destroying the Four Olds and Establishing the Four News’ (i.e. new ideology, new culture, new customs and new habits). Mao sought to appeal to the masses – especially the young – over the heads of the Party and local officials in order to use them to purge his opponents at the local level. Mao argued that all the truths of Marxism could be summed up in one sentence. ‘To rebel (zaofan) is justified’. From this perspective, the Cultural Revolution should overthrow the old ideology, old culture, the old customs and the old habits – to smash the bourgeoisie completely – to make Mao Zedong Thought radiant, so that it illuminated the entire capital, the entire nation and the whole world. Mao Zedong Thought, as expressed in the Little Red Book, aka as Quotations from Chairman Mao (1964), was a chief instrument in his strategy. These quotations were a collection of speeches, platitudes, homilies and rants composed by Mao and read and chanted, without reflection or irony, as a form of drill by the Red Guards, quasi-militias of young people organized at the local communal level. Part of the Red Guards’ aim was to reform all feudal, capitalist and bureaucratic and revisionist institutions. The Red Guards became widely acknowledged within the nation and news of their existence spread worldwide in the summer of 1966. Mass rallies were held to acknowledge the ‘political correctness’ of Mao Zedong Thought. The eight ‘meetings’ with Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square were attended by millions of people who flocked to Beijing from around China between August and November 1966. In turn, students from Beijing travelled to the countryside in squads – free train travel was made available – to spread the word of the Cultural Revolution.3 Mao Zedong Thought was an institutional fashion with many ramifications. Youths, whether male or female, wore Mao Zedong jackets and trousers. Shanghai barbers, under the command of Red Guards proposed stopping all ‘gangster’ and ‘Hong Kong’ haircuts and cancelling such ‘capitalist’ services as manicures, facials and massages. Madame Mao tried to make her dress model the ‘national costume’ for women (although she envied Imelda Marcos’ dressing room, when Imelda visited China in September 1974). The dental sections of hospitals stopped cleaning teeth. Many Chinese cities, including Wuhan, Huangzhou, Guangzhou, Harbin, Tianjing, Changchun, Ji’nan, Shenyang, as well as the disputed territory of Tibet, all experienced action by the Red Guards seeking to ‘Destroy the Four Olds’. The Cultural Revolution’s ripples spread to Hong Kong, where there were demonstrations and attacks on factory bosses. Ethnic-sounding personal names and places in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet were changed to such designations as ‘workerpeasant-soldier’ and ‘resist America’ (Yan and Gao 1996, p. 73). Street names, store names, trademarks, names of halls and residences, names of dishes that triggered edginess, impatience and intolerance on the part of the Red Guards, were all revolutionized. As the colour red stood for revolution and ‘left’ signified progress, the Red Guards disputed prevailing traffic regulations and insisted on red as the

68

A. Chan et al.


‘go’ sign and traffic changing from right to left. Chang (2003, p. 288), a Red Guard herself, reports how things unfolded: For red to mean ‘stop’ was considered impossibly counterrevolutionary. It should of course mean ‘go’. And traffic should not keep to the right, as was the practice, it should be on the left. For a few days we ordered the traffic policemen aside and controlled the traffic ourselves. I was stationed at a street corner telling cyclists to ride on the left. In Chengdu there were not many cars or traffic lights, but at the few big crossroads there was chaos. In the end, the old roles reasserted themselves, owing to Zhou Enlai, who managed to convince the Peking Red Guard leaders. But the youngsters found justifications for this: I was told by a Red Guard in my school that in Britain traffic kept to the left, so ours had to keep the right to show our anti-imperialist spirit. She did not mention America.

Foreigners were particularly suspected as anti-Mao. On the 24 August 1966, Red Guards, who were directly supported by the Central Small Group and Public Security Bureau, stormed into the Beijing Saint Mary’s Franciscan nunnery and drove out the Catholic nuns, who were, according to them, ‘in religious garb but active as spies’ (Yan and Gao 1996, p. 69). The convent was closed two days later and the Public Security Bureau publicly issued the banishment order amid slogans such as ‘Scram, you counter-revolutionary foreign nuns’ (Yan and Gao 1996, p. 69). Eight foreign nuns were deported. In a ‘manifesto’ by the Beijing No.26 Middle School Red Guards entitled One Hundred Items for Destroying the Old and Establishing the New, we can sample a few of these strategies for establishing the new (Exhibit 1). A small group orchestrated the violence in Beijing from top to bottom in a way that fuelled the unconstitutional acts of the Red Guards. For those identified as being on the wrong side of red categories by the Guards, the result was torture, beatings, sleep deprivation, around the clock group interrogations, withholding of food and many types of ill treatment, including confiscation of homes and property (Spence 1999). An estimated one third of Beijing’s homes were ransacked and at

Exhibit 1. A sample from One hundred items for destroying the Old and establishing the New.a 32. Laundries must cease washing pants, stockings, and handkerchiefs for those bourgeoisie wives, misses, and young gentlemen and completely crush their stuck-up airs. 51. The bastards of the bourgeoisie are not permitted to occupy a large number of houses, the minimum limit being three persons to one room. 65. The family head system shall be destroyed, and children may make suggestions to grownups. 85. Sofas, couches, etc., may not be produced in great quantities. 86. Expensive articles such as gold pens etc., shall not be produced in great quantities (except for export) because they do not serve the broad worker, peasant, soldier masses. 89. When prescribing medicine, doctors must destroy the Western framework of writing in English and clearly explain the type of medicine prescribed. Their signatures have to be legible. 95. Those who have names with feudal bourgeois overtones will voluntarily go to police stations to change their names. a

From Schoenhals (1996, pp. 213–222).



69

least a hundred of Beijing University’s more than two thousand faculty and staff had their homes confiscated. By the end of September 1966, those who were branded as Black Five Categories (the binary opposites of those who were Red) were driven out of Beijing. The Red Guards confiscated gold, silver and precious jewellery from those denounced and driven out. In the Central Committee meeting chaired by Mao Zedong in October 1966, statistics of the ‘Fruits of War of The Red Guards’ were presented (Yang 1995, p. 84). A great deal of wealth had been seized, according to the list of booty, while 397,400 people were classified as ‘Ox-demons and snake-spirits’and driven out of Beijing. Exhibit 2 contains extracts from big-character posters written by teachers and students who themselves either took part in or witnessed violence in the Jianguang Junior Middle School. These were published in New Beijing University’s ‘Smile Mingling in Their Midst’ Combat Team, and edited and published in Shanghai in

Exhibit 2. Sample from How was the young teacher Bei Guancheng from Jianguang Middle School forced to die? – Report of an investigation into the Bei Guancheng incident.a Eyewitness 1. Fei Zhensheng (elderly staff worker) I saw some twenty students surrounding Bei Guancheng on the terrace of Building No.5. Three or four students were beating him up. He did not utter a sound, but just let them go on beating him. A student by the name of XXX was most vicious and threw Bei to the concrete floor may be five or six times. At one point he was laying face up when students XXX and XXX stepped forward to slap him in the face for about two minutes. They took turns, one taking over when the other had to rest, their slapping producing a sound like exploding firecrackers. Eyewitnesses 2. Chen Dongsheng (teacher) and Liu Xueqing (Red Guard): The students were violently beating and kicking Bei Guancheng, and dragged him off to the ping-pong table and propped him up against it, his arms and legs already limp. (…) From afar you could hear the noise and the ‘slam, bam, slam, bam’ sound of him being beaten. Then the students ordered Bei Guancheng to lift his arms and lower his head and admit to being a counter-revolutionary, an ox-monster and a snake-demon. Eyewitness 3. Fu Xiaokang (Red Guard in the second grade, class 7) Since we are all rather mischievous students then, and since we had heard that some people had already beaten Bei Guangcheng, we said right away in unison: ‘So we can beat him up too then?’ Having said that, we got some bamboo sticks and other weapons to thrash him with and got all fired up. Eyewitness 4. Chen Yong (Red Guard in the first grade, class 1) (…) Bei Guancheng was dragged off by us to the roof of Building No.5 to be given a beating. I said we should not beat him, but student XXX said that the leader of the Red Guards had said: ‘You just go ahead and beat him up. Even if you kill him, you won’t be held responsible’. Words like that actually gave us courage, ordering us to go and beat him, which is what we did next. In the course of the beating, student XXX tried to force Bei Guancheng to commit suicide by jumping off the roof, but I pleaded with him, ‘What if he commits suicide and drags you with him? You’d die too.’ Because I said that, students XXX and XXX no longer tried to force him to commit suicide by jumping off the roof. a


70

A. Chan et al.


1967 as How was the Young Teacher Bei Guancheng from Jianguang Middle School Forced to Die? What happened occurred with the blessings of top authorities (from Mao down), who, by decreeing that the army and police must not intervene against the youngsters (Chang and Halliday 2007), cleared the way for the purges to escalate. 3.4. The rise of the cult of personality and the battle against bureaucracy As in the Soviet personality cult, where the people were led to believe that Stalin was omniscient and could do no wrong, Mao was similarly regarded during the Cultural Revolution by the followers of The Little Red Book. A song announced that ‘Father is close, mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao’ (Chang and Halliday 2007, p. 592). The seeds of the cult of personality, once planted, continue to bear fruit, as The Economist (2013) recently noted: Through their blogs and websites, Maoists have urged that December 26th be declared ‘Mao Zedong shengdanjie’. The term shengdanjie literally means ‘sacred-birth festival’ and also happens to be the Chinese word for Christmas. They note that, given the time difference between West and East, China’s Mao-mas overlaps with Western celebrations of Jesus’s birth. Thus, as one vitriolic leftist website put it, ‘Westerners with yellow hair and blue eyes and big noses celebrate their fictitious shengdanjie’ on the same day as Chinese and the ‘global proletariat’ celebrate the ‘real’ one of Mao.

The power struggle between Mao and his adversaries escalated into a struggle between different conceptions of authority and organization. Mao’s opponents argued that routinization, rationalization and bureaucratization were crucial to economic and social success in total states or mobilization regimes. Mao’s public statements claimed that a bureaucratic class had emerged in China (i.e. the class of people taking the capitalist road or ‘capitalist roaders’). Mao’s interpretation of Marx’s idea of equality led him to despise bureaucratization because of its inherent hierarchical principle. Against the bureaucrats who sought to institutionalize less politically correct and more technically rational approaches to agriculture and production generally, Mao proposed populist diatribes against all forms of routinization and bureaucratization, as a veiled attack on those whom he saw as his enemies. When Mao put his proposal to launch the Cultural Revolution to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in May 1966, only a little more than half of the members reluctantly approved it – but it was a majority. Mao’s ultimate goal in the Cultural Revolution was to build an egalitarian society, but only after ridding society of bureaucracy and those who served it, rather than Mao Zedong Thought. Following Gong (1995, pp. 48–49), there were three major charges against bureaucracy. First, Mao accused members of the bureaucracy of promoting ‘cultural liberalism’, whereby some intellectuals, even with limited degrees of cultural freedom, used roundabout techniques to try to encourage criticism of the society (and Mao) through arts and literature. Mao wrote that they gave ‘free rein to all the various ghosts and monsters who for many years have abounded in our press, radio, magazines, books, textbooks, platforms, works of literature, cinema, drama, ballads and stories, the fine arts, music, dance, etc.’ Second, after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, the bureaucracy through favouring technical rationality, rather than revolutionary fervour, eased up on class struggle. Mao argued that the struggle should be intensified not because of enemy



71

conspiracy, but because of the emergence of a ‘new class’ with Chinese characters – the newborn bureaucratic class. Finally, the bureaucracy promoted economic liberalism, Mao claimed. Mao’s opposition to the economic liberalism of the new class in China was a rearguard attempt to deny his own mistakes by launching counter claims against the bureaucracy’s modifications of his disastrous development strategies. Fairbank wrote in 1992 that the Cultural Revolution was, in some respects, Mao’s effort to make ‘democratic centralism’ more democratic and less centralist (Fairbank 1992, p. 386), thus creating, through a ‘revolution in the revolution’, a new governing superstructure until, finally, no social classes would exist. Under the strictures of democratic centralism, Mao proposed that to be a genuine Marxist– Leninist, willing to serve the masses wholeheartedly, working with the majority and accepting their criticisms, being modest with oneself and always ready to indulge in self-criticism, was a supreme virtue (Spence 1999, p. 157). Despite the Great Leap Forward’s downfall as ideologically inspired practices confronted empirical realities, Mao’s idea was that its principles of learning from the masses could be regenerated. By correctly identifying enemies and constructing scripts that categorized them, a popular discourse could be encouraged as the means of achieving the regenerative process. With the support of mass mobilization, deviant categories could be rooted out and destroyed. Mao stated that it was necessary to ‘set fires, every few years to keep the revolution alive’. Mao came to see his mission as not only partly to set the fire, but also to teach the young to do it by themselves (Spence 1999, p. 157). The turmoil of the Cultural Revolution as a ‘naturally occurring’ experiment took place because Mao was able, in an extension of charisma, to mobilize the young. In its pure form, charismatic authority has a character specifically foreign to everyday routine structures. The means of charismatic transmission, in a country that was technologically backward and underdeveloped, were the big-character posters, the Tiananmen Square Rallies and the mobilization of the Red Guards. It was through these primitive but effective means of communication that essential institutional work promoting radical social change was accomplished. The Red Guards enacted Maoist Thought by reading from the millions of copies of The Little Red Book that were produced and widely distributed at this time. They used it as a device for hundreds of thousands of contests against local powers and symbols in local struggles about deviation from the correct ideological line of Mao Thought. In one place, the struggle could be used to settle some long-standing ideological dispute or to express a deeply held sense of injustice, while elsewhere it could be a tool for rank opportunism. The Little Red Book provided institutional shape for the truism that all politics are local. Most participants, especially those in the rebel faction, genuinely believed that they were fighting against a bureaucratic class (the capitalist roaders) who were their oppressors. Mao’s proposal to oust capitalist roaders by mass participation in politics was clothed in claims of being ‘pro-democracy’. In opposing established authority embodied in the official bureaucrats, who, in Mao’s perspective, were ossified and encouraged politically incorrect deviationism, Mao constructed himself as a champion of popular and participatory democracy against unrepresentative bureaucracy. In a parallel vein, Mao warned that there was always a serious threat of revisionism whenever permanent organization was instituted to replace permanent revolution; he saw that many high-ranking cadres were following revisionist


72

A. Chan et al.

policies. Lüthi (2008) points out that to serve Mao’s needs in the conflict against domestic rivals, tension with the USSR was inflated at the end of 1965 and the Soviet system categorized as revisionist and deviationist, eschewing correct Marxist–Leninist thought. These revisionists in the USSR were degrading correct Marxist–Leninist positions and encouraging deviations in China. Mao instigated regional leaders to identify deviance amongst cadres, arguing that ‘if revisionists appear at the Centre, you should rebel’. Spence (1999) observed that, with these manoeuvres, the ground was being laid for a new kind of division within the Party, ‘one that pitted those who were truly red – the believers in Mao Zedong Thought and the purifying power of the trusting masses – against those who based their prestige and policies on their specific expertise, whether that lay in precise economic planning, advanced education or mastery of bureaucratic procedures’ (p. 153). 3.5. Stigmatization and categorization The Cultural Revolution occurred as a result of administrative and institutionalized policies sanctioned by the central government that were framed in rhetorical devices (White 1989). The rhetoric provided those who would be Maoists with members’ categorization devices for dividing ‘the good’ from ‘the bad’. Initially, these categorizations were developed and circulated in personal networks and through patron/client relations, and communicated in the big-character posters. The messages found legitimation in the symbolic use of The Little Red Book (see Exhibit 3), a document that was interpreted by different factions in different ways. The categories found articulation and expression through a climate of confrontational and locally focused campaigning. Specific categorization devices were used to label members of the society as one or the other of some dominant binary categories, official campaigns were launched that mobilized mass compliance and constant monitoring of potential deviants, as well as legitimating the use of violence. In this way, the feverish need for constant revolution that stressed the incorrectness of bureaucracy and routine was maintained nationally. The Cultural Revolution’s categorization devices, campaigning, constant struggles and defaming were widely used to create a deep chasm of mutual suspicion and distrust among ordinary people. The seeds of the categorization devices were contained in a deformation of Marx’s Hegelian-influenced dialectical ideas about the role of historical class actors and the trajectory that they should follow. Binary divisions were inherent in Marxism. While Marx’s class analysis involved labelling, assigning people to essentially binary categories of ‘Labor’ and ‘Capital’, ‘Bourgoisie’ and ‘Proletarian’, Marx, at the time of writing the Manifesto of the Commmunist Party (1848), was not the leader of a coercive state, but a relatively unknown intellectual. The damage done by his labelling occurred through its subsequent adoption as a basis for state reformation by the Bolsheviks. Unlike the Bolsheviks, Mao did not have total command of the state apparatuses at the time of the Cultural Revolution, but he had command of a huge propaganda apparatus with an army – the Red Guard – of loyal followers. At the core of the propaganda apparatuses was systematic labelling, using the categorization devices that Mao Thought produced. All city people were classified under one of several fixed titles, based on the income source of the household head, namely workers, peasants, capitalists, landlords, petty bourgeois and vagabonds. The Five Categories Elements


73

Exhibit 3. Interrogation record of Wang Guangmei (1921–2006), wife of Liu Shaoqi, Vice Chairman of CCP and President of the PRC.a


On 10th April, 1967, around 6:30 a.m., at the Tsinghua University Central Building 7th Floor, ‘Jianggangshan Regiment’ Red Guards interrogated Liu Shaoqi’s wife – she was brought before the crowd, and struggled against. INTERROGATOR: We have this right! You are being struggled against today. We are at liberty to wage struggle in whatever form we may want to, and you have no freedom. You might as well forget about your vile theory of ‘everybody being equal before truth’. We are the revolutionary masses, and you are a notorious counter-revolutionary old hag. Don’t try to confuse the class demarcation line! At the time limit set, the (Jingganshan) ‘Ghostbusters’ (Zhuo-guidui) began to force Wang to put on the outlandish dress. WANG: Wait a moment. (They ignore her. Wang Guangmei sits on the floor and refuses to allow them to slip the dress on her. Eventually she is pulled to her feet and the dress is slipped on her even though she has said that it was too small for her). INTERROGATOR: Have you got it on now? WANG: You have violated Chairman Mao’s instruction about not struggling against people by force. ([RED GUARDS] Reading in unison [from Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’]: ‘A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.’) WANG: You violate Chairman Mao’s instructions by saying … (Wang Guangmei is interrupted and forced to wear silk stockings and high-heeled shoes and a specially made necklace. She is photographed.) … My point is that you are using coercion. Chairman Mao says that nobody is allowed to strike, abuse, or insult another person. INTERROGATOR: Nonsense! It is you who have insulted us. By wearing this dress to flirt with Sukarno in Indonesia, you have put the Chinese people to shame and insulted the Chinese people as a whole. Coercion is called for when dealing with such a reactionary bourgeois element as you – the biggest pickpocket on the Tsinghua campus! WANG: One day we shall see if I am indeed ‘reactionary’ or not! INTERROGATOR: What! Are you trying to reverse the verdict? (Everybody begins listing her crimes). a


further distinguished landlords, rich peasants, counter revolutionaries, bad elements and rightists. Certain groups were favoured, their status coming from their structural ascription to a position in the class structure, rather than from their individual accomplishments. The Communist Party Political Department cadres promoted the formation of youth groups drawn from the ‘five red types’ (i.e. workers, peasants, revolutionary cadres, revolutionary soldiers and dependents of revolutionary martyrs), invoking the ‘blood pedigree theory’ summed up in a couplet, which can be translated thus: If the father’s a hero, the son’s a good chap;if the father’s a reactionary, the son’s

74

A. Chan et al.


a bad egg (White 1989, p. 222). To avoid the consequences of being labelled a ‘bad egg’ jailing one’s own mother was a possible escape, as Hua (2014) recently wrote in The New York Times: In 1970, when China was in the grip of the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Hongbing, a 16-year-old in Guzhen, a county in Anhui Province, made a fateful decision. During a family debate that year, his mother, Fang Zhongmou, had criticized Mao Zedong for his cult of personality. Her son and his father, believing her views to be counterrevolutionary, decided to inform on her. She was arrested that same day. Mr. Zhang still recalls how his mother’s shoulder joints gave a grating creak as her captors pulled the cord tight. Two months later, she was shot to death. (…) In 2013, the Chinese media reported the lifelong regrets of Mr. Zhang, then 59 years old. For years he would often break down in tears, howling and wailing. ‘I see her in my dreams’, he said, ‘just as young as she was then. I kneel on the floor, clutching her hands, for fear she will disappear. ‘Mom,’ I cry, ‘I beg your forgiveness!’ But she doesn’t respond. Never once has she answered me. This is my punishment’.

The massive scale of the violence against the ‘bad eggs’ occurred for a number of reasons. Ordinary people had become confused and disorganized by the constant campaigns and the rhetorical hypocrisy of a regime that could claim that production targets were exceeded even while, around them, people were starving. Affirming lies while living painful truths is a difficult position in which to find any authentic sense of self. Experiential truth denied the social constructions of the Party. The fates of political actors with recourse to enormously powerful resources of legitimacy, mobilization and organization were at stake. In such a situation, Mao’s diversionary tactics were to attack people whose past status or that of their ancestors’, attached sufficient stigma to them as landlords, bourgeoisie or some other despised category, to make them enemies of the people. While in another society a demagogue might have labelled ‘the Jews’, ‘immigrants’ or ‘illegal asylum seekers’ as the scapegoats, in the PRC it was the enemies of the people, according to Mao’s campaign. Stigmatic categorization devices created politically different groups; how the processes unleashed worked in practice can be seen from Exhibit 3, an interrogation record from the Cultural Revolution. Struggle and resistance were mobilized around the limited choices presented in the binary categories of ‘being red’ versus ‘being privileged’, even when that privilege was faded, shabby and largely antiquarian in terms of contemporary realities (despite the Great Helmsman’s and the red elite’s claims to privileges). The redder the conviction to ‘search out hidden enemies’, the more The Little Red Book provided cover. To refuse participation risked criticisms that would escalate into major attacks for not having responded to Mao’s call (including at least being humiliated in public and at worst being killed). The ultimate concern was to conform to and follow the ‘right line’ in a situation, where populist ‘red’ campaigns sanctioned and legitimized ‘ideologically correct’ movements as against those that were designated as class enemies. The mass movement was autonomous and haphazard in its organization, but it gained institutional legitimation by the simple act of waving The Little Red Book and chanting the appropriate slogans. 4. Discussion: institutional work and revolution Institutional theorists have paid disproportionate attention to institutions as a source of stability and persistence (Garud et al. 2007). Other research has considered the



75

need to avoid obscuring institutional political processes (Clemens and Cook 1999) by focusing on the role of institutional work as a source of change. In this paper, we have discussed several facets of the Chinese Cultural Revolution to understand how the institutional work contributes to the creation of oppressive regimes. On the basis of the case, we find that intense institutional work is mandatory when making revolutionary change possible. We next offer a process of explanation of how revolutionary change involves a significant component of institutional work. The importance of institutional work in the creation of new institutional orders that are both revolutionary and oppressive is not new (see e.g. Marti and Fernandez 2013), but is still scarcely theorized. As the case shows, revolutionary change at the societal level involves a powerful and respected (more specifically, in this case, feared) leadership, that offers a vision for a positive future, possibly with utopian traits (Clegg et al. 2012) whose vision is articulated in terms of an actionable ideology. For an ideology to be actionable, it needs to offer clear behavioural indications to the followers. Abstractness helps here: abstractions produce a collective meaning clearly defined by categories, promoting identities that are both inclusive – in terms of defining a concrete in-group – as well as exclusive – in terms of the oppositional definition of the in-group to the out-group. The role of core in-group members is critical, giving traction to the leader’s inspiration for action. A minority of hard core members may lead the way, playing the role of ‘violence experts’ (Tilly 2003) that will show others how to belong. Those members may not only adhere to the ideology, but also derive accolades from the broader membership for their vanguard role, expressing role narcissism (Hinton 2005) that can be a source of vicarious learning for others. Top leaders offer clear indications for action by, for example, approving local initiatives by these violent ‘experts’, either through their silent approval or by presenting these individuals as exemplary for and to the broader membership. In this way, the previous categorization (us vs. them) is reinforced into a process of stigmatization: ‘them’ are progressively dehumanized and diminished (Haslam and Loughnan 2014) and their stigma is often accompanied by the staging of specific sociomaterial evidence, indicating signs of right and wrong. For example, showing the Little Red Book in the PRC (right), wearing spectacles in Khmer Rouge Cambodia (wrong), wearing the yellow star in Nazi Germany (wrong) or wearing red clothes in Chavist Venezuela (right; Carroll 2013) all objectively distinguished members of in-groups from out-groups: the psychological process of belonging assumed material existence. Local leaders may experiment with approaches to managing the out-group, thus providing further information and examples that may be useful to other local leaders’.4 Elimination can be operationalized in a more or less normal way. In the PRC, the Red Guards’ access to free train travel meant that they were able to spread their practices far and wide by example in a society, in which the means of communication were otherwise ill-developed, as a result of inadequate infrastructure, rugged geography and regional variation in spoken language. Descending on remote locations as emissaries charged with revolutionary fervour that people knew was dangerous to resist, they could easily stigmatize others through the use of the categorization devices that defined both them and these ‘Others’. So far we have described a process that, to a great extent, involved the leadership issuing an ideological vision inspiring action by adherents of the ideology (the Red Guards, for example, or in Nazi Germany the ‘real Nazis’ [Mann 2000]


76

A. Chan et al.

defined in opposition to the ordinary Germans). Ideological adherence and action inspired by it is a necessary part of the overall institutional work that occurs in events, such as the Cultural Revolution, but how is the passivity of bystanders achieved? We suggest that this passivity is the result of systematic and persistent dual institutional work that is necessary not only to animate true believers but also to construct the representation of the in-group as a unity. As Goldhagen (1997) remarked, destructive tasks are necessary to make way for constructive tasks: destruction is required to construct something new, such that duality lends institutional value to destructive tasks as precursors of construction. Destruction and construction are fused in action in deeds that demonstrate the reason framing the micro actions of fervent members while simultaneously neutralizing resistance through spectacular local violence. The destruction of opposition is part of the construction effort; those that oppose the new vision necessarily define themselves as part of the old vision that needs to be eradicated. The dual function is so critical that totalitarian leaders invariably create measures that replace the rule of law with their own rule and decree. In Maoist China (as in Nazi Germany), the rule of the dictator was the most important institutional template. For instance, by1942, Germany could be described as ‘a true Fuhrer state’ (Kershaw 2000, p. 511), one in which Hitler was the law. Likewise, Mao described himself as a ‘man without law or limit’ (Chang and Halliday 2007, p. 396). Such a situation may lead in one or other of two directions: either a technically rational bureaucracy will become a bureaucracy ‘tamed’ by political dictate and direction to do the will of the directing authorities (as happened in Nazi Germany) or it will be attacked and delegitimated to bypass the centrality of its reason by establishing a new institutional template, as happened in Maoist China or in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, just a few years later, which canalized the reason of the cadres, rather than that of those who preceded and ruled before them. The sequence of categorization, stigmatization and elimination makes resistance less likely because it situates bystanders inside the in-group. The ‘subjective experience of subordination’ (Lee and Zhang 2013) of bystanders is actively constructed, via intense institutional work, diminishing their motivation and legitimacy to resist. Being part of the in-group, they have obligations and responsibilities. Obligations are not natural: they have to be manufactured (Owens et al. 2013). Such a manufacturing occurs through dedicated institutional work. In the case of the Cultural Revolution, mass violence transcended being the product of the will of one man and his clan to become an institutional product, embedded in and realized through the Red Guard’s materializations of Chairman Mao Thought and its widespread communication through direct dissemination by roving Red Guards and its material institutionalization in big-character posters. Structures of obedience to ideological diktat offer a number of valuable processes to mass violence: formal incentives such as the possibility of creating brilliant careers in the practical application of ideology, as well as the reinforcement of psychological incentives, including a sense of belonging and a sense of entitlement to be violent. In such a milieu, the banalization of violent action becomes normalized and an objectual environment constructed, in which the out-group’s status can be used to elevate the status of the in-group (Arendt 1963, Milgram 1974, Clegg et al. 2013, Pina e Cunha et al. 2014). These processes show that it takes much more than pre-existing social cleavages for violence to unfold (Valentino 2004):



77

without institutional work in favour of violence, existing institutions would possibly neutralize non-institutionalized violence. The predominant focus of research in the past has been on the role of the Cultural Revolution as an ideology; we would wish to divert research attention to the institutional work creating resonance between the macro, the meso and the micro levels. The creation of the in-group/out-group opposition is necessary but insufficient to justify the violence unleashed. It is the appropriation of the institutional apparatus by a violence-prone leadership that motivates institutional–cum–political work that transformed the Red Guards fanatical stooges into a lethal machinery of death and destruction by virtue of new forms of governmentality (Su 2011). When the Pandora’s Box of revolutionary violence is opened, nobody is truly secure. As one reviewer pointed out, during the ‘Wuhan incident’ Mao himself risked being the victim of such violence. During the summer of 1967, China descended into a state of what Mao later described as ‘all round civil war’. According to Mao, ‘Everywhere people were fighting, dividing into two factions; there were two factions in every factory, in every school, in every province, in every county; every ministry was like that. In July and August 1967, nothing could be done; there was massive upheaval throughout the country’ (Macfarquhar and Schoenhals 2006, p. 199). Mao gave instructions to quell factional fighting in Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan. Despite advice to the contrary from colleagues concerned for his safety, Mao intended to include Wuhan, the most important industrial city in central China, in his proposed southern tour of inspection

Powerful, violent leadership

Leader’s legitimacy increases

The hierarchical/ bureaucratic apparatus shrinks and/or is bypassed or instrumentalized

Actionable ideology

“Violence experts” and/or core members of the leading team in charge

Offer clear behaviors’ indications to followers

Out-group members are stigmatized

Expelled from the system

Followers experience a meaningful identity and/or fear being shattered Vicarious learning

Other followers experience a meaningful identity and/or fear of exclusion

Figure 1. Institutionalizing revolution through bypassing existing ‘old’ institutions.

78

A. Chan et al.


in early July 1967. Zhou Enlai was supposed to mediate the dispute between the factions of the Million Heroes and the Wuhan Steel-Tempered Three, but according to Mao, ‘the fighting scared him to death, and he forced me to flee to Shanghai in a hurry’ (Macfarquhar and Schoenhals 2006, p. 211, quoting Li 1994, p. 492). At two in the morning of 21 July 1967, Mao fled Wuhan for Shanghai, escorted by air force fighters because, as a result of events that he had set in motion, his safety from a mob of soldiers and party cadres could not be guaranteed. The Revolution seemed as if it might consume its own. As Deroy and Clegg (2015) explained, one might know how disruptive change processes start, but not be able to control how they end (Figure 1). 5. Implications and limitations The structure of critiques of bureaucracy couched in terms of the cultural and expressed in terms of binary oppositions always leads to dualism. The constitution of a certain state of affairs as denoting the ‘old’, the ‘traditional’ or the ‘modern’ invites rhetorical opposition as the ‘new’, the ‘modern’ or the postmodern’. It also suggests a limited dialectics: that the old can only be erased and replaced by the exertion of energies that, rhetorically, the old is blocking. As all blockages require force to eliminate them, the strength of the ‘new’, presented as inexorably emergent, must exert force if it is to eliminate and overcome the old. Where the blockage focused on is that of a local culture’s categories of sense-making that the revolutionary agency will challenge and change, then the masses of ordinary members must be mobilized to accept, advocate and assemble the new meanings. Meaning sticks; meaning organizes the collective reception of events into sense. To believe that one can change meanings’ path means acting as a ‘switchman’ of history, a delusion that seems to be a part of the revolutionary syndrome. It is another instance of the fallacy of leadership – that leaders can master events and change history; that leaders can practice what Benton (1981) called ‘the paradox of emancipation’ by telling others what these others should think because the leader knows their ‘objective’ interests better than they can. If they are to be free, they must stop thinking in terms of the categories that they use and instead accept those of the leader. Of course, such positions are dogmatic and reminiscent of revealed truths. Events make or break leaders and what these will be is out of their control, by definition (Deleuze 1969). Knowing this, the switchmen can throw the switch to vaudeville, to a heightened dramaturgy that stages a performance contrasting sharply with the mundane reality of everyday life, creating a staged event. Everyday culture is essentially a performance, suggests Goffman (1956). If the presentation of self is a performance designed to render the mundane categories of everyday life redundant, then certain elements of vaudeville may be necessary to characterize the cultural alternatives to the taken for granted. Mao embraced vaudeville with increasing frequency as events outflanked the positions adopted. A cultural critique is essentially moral, constructed in terms of normatively preferred and castigated categories, and thus the process of moving from the bad to the good can only be made institutionally, through rhetorical moral exhortation and practices of passionate destruction that must assume non-subtle and dramatic forms of representation, to be communicated to the masses. In the PRC as well as in other revolutionary regimes (such as Nazi Germany or Khmer Rouge Cambodia), intense institutional work precedes symbolic and real



79

violence. Categories are necessary to divide those that are on the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’ sides of a revolutionary path, with stigmatization devices being built on top of already accepted categories. The process often involves a utopian vision that its adherents believe cannot be resisted because it is so inherently authentic: hence, those that ventilate doubts should immediately be suspect. Expressions of doubt or signs of recalcitrance can be turned against those so assigned to make them members of the out-group. The established official utopia separates the good and the bad (Clegg et al. 2012) and activates the institutional machinery to unite those inside the in-group, no matter the intensity of their convictions, thereby limiting resistance. The micro actions of local leaders are necessary to validate the top leadership’s assumptions, but institutional work also needs to be done to include the so-called bystanders. Categorical acts of exclusion need to be manufactured simultaneously with categorical acts of explicit inclusion (Haslam and Loughnan 2014). ‘Frames’ need to be communicated and internalized for people to develop a sense of groupness (Owens et al. 2013). Such work is conducted at various levels: the top level produces an actionable ideology, local militias act as ‘ethnopolitical entrepreneurs’ (Hagan and Rymond-Richmond 2008) translating the vision into practical terms, while local institutional work seeks to enrol, translate and condition in-group membership through deploying the categories of exclusion. The limitations of research such as this are evident: the events are not current and we are not current witnesses to them. As noted in the methods, much of the evidence comes from secondary documents and, as with any contested politics differing accounts will always be an integral part of the contestation. In addition, we stressed elements in the story using an institutional perspective, which necessarily leaves untouched a number of important topics associated with a phenomenon of the magnitude of the Cultural Revolution. Nonetheless, we would argue that close attention to the institutional work involved in the Cultural Revolution demonstrates how large-scale social changes against established institutions can be launched and organized. 6. Conclusion Categorization along ideological lines provided by a utopian vision bestows a claim to the ‘right’ to exclude and diminish the ‘wrong’. Enlightenment carries with it the necessity of unenlightenment, a lack of commitment, understanding or articulation of politically correct views. Unenlightenment is the necessary blockage that enlightenment must oppose. It is not because of some malign intentions on the part of the perpetrators, but because of a vision for the purification of society that those categorized as being at best, unenlightened and at worst ‘sub-human’ (Kershaw 2000) should be removed. As Mao famously said, revolution is not a dinner party (Dikotter 2010). Those in the wrong categories, those who are ‘matter out of place’ according to the powerful description by Douglas (1966), need to be eradicated for the sake of the greater good. Purification is necessary to implement the vision and the vision legitimates the action of the ‘purifiers’, giving further support to the distinction between right and wrong. Persistent and morally sophisticated institutional work is necessary to make radical change possible. Macro, meso and micro processes of institutional work operate in parallel, reinforcing each other and articulating utopian desire with


80

A. Chan et al.

claims to political legitimacy and local possibility. Together, leaders and followers at several levels participate in the processes of categorizing and imposing categorizations. Categorizations in revolutionary times have explicitly stigmatizing processes. Managing categorization/stigmatization is thus one critical component of radical change processes. That this is the case is just as true of organizational change programs pursued by public or private organizations as it is of state-wide programs of revolutionary change. For instance, an organization whose elites are rhetorically committed to enlightenment through the pursuit of excellence must have some categories of past, present or external non-enlightenment with which to frame those strategies that seek excellence. Where the pursuit of change works on internal organization, people’s identities as they are constituted organizationally will be at stake and some will be assigned to the wrong side of the binary divide in order to justify the rhetoric that is used to legitimate what the elites define as the right side. These categorical devices hurt people and sometimes the violence is not merely symbolic, as study of the institutional work of Cultural Revolution demonstrates. Notes 1. It should be noted that at the time that this occurred, particularly bold Chinese cadres from the Academy of the Social Sciences, when travelling overseas, as they started to do increasingly after 1976, would often, in conversation, refer to the Gang of Four, whilst holding the fingers and thumb of one hand outstretched – a subtle way of referring to Mao’s inclusion in the ‘Gang’. 2. The central idea behind the Great Leap Forward was that rapid development of China’s agricultural and industrial sectors should take place in parallel. Industrialization would occur through the use of the one resource China had in plentiful and cheap supply: human labour power. Huge ‘People’s Communes’ were formed as peasant villages were consolidated into collective enterprises. By the end of 1958, approximately 25,000 communes had been set-up, each with an average of 5000 households. Each commune was encouraged to set-up a system of steel production that was local, decentralized and based on locally made backyard furnaces that were to be fed through scrap metal. Additionally, labour was diverted into major construction projects, digging dams and reservoirs with picks, shovels and buckets. As fuel for the furnaces, local reserves of timber were used. 3. Echoes were heard in the West: students at European universities such as the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics were staging sit-ins and protesting against the university authorities in a series of televisual events that were often marked by use of The Little Red Book as a prop. Usually, it was held aloft and shaken vigorously in the general direction of whatever was constituted as the authorities. 4. In Nazi Germany, for example, there is evidence of military officers giving explicit orders to their men not to participate in executions because that was not proper soldierly behaviour (Kershaw 2000), but as the Final Solution gained formal approval, this type of order became impossible to issue. At this stage, the out-group is already perceived by the perpetrators as less than human and as the cause of its own disgrace.

Notes on contributors Andrew Chan is Associate Professor in the Department of Management, City University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD from University of Lancaster Management School. He has published in Organization Studies, Organization, and Culture and Organization. His research interest is in organizational culture in Chinese enterprises. Address: Department of Management, City University of Hong Kong, 83, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Email: [email protected].


81

Stewart Clegg is Professor in the Management Discipline Group at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). He is also Executive Director of the Centre for Management and Organization Studies at UTS. He has published widely in this and other journals and is well known for his many contributions to the power literature in books, handbooks, chapters and journal articles. Currently he is completing a book on a work of the architect Frank Gehry, called Gehry in Sydney, co-authored with Liisa Naar.


Miguel Pina e Cunha is a Professor of Organizational Theory and Behavior at Nova School of Business and Economics, Lisbon. He has authored over 80 publications on topics concerning positive and negative organizing, and emergent processes in organizations, such as improvisation, surprise and serendipity. Arménio Rego is an Associate Professor at the Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal, and a member of Business Research Unit, ISCTE-IUL, Portugal. His research interests include workplace creativity, happiness at work, virtues and organizational virtuousness, and authentic leadership.

References Arendt, H., 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil. London: Faber and Faber. Benton, T., 1981. Objective’ interests and the sociology of power. Sociology, 15 (2), 61–184. Benton, G. and Chun, L., eds., 2010. Was Mao really a monster? The academic response to Chang and Halliday’s Mao: the unknown story. London: Routledge. Carroll, R., 2013. Comandante: the life and legacy of Hugo Chávez. London: Canongate. Chang, J., 2003. Wild swans: three daughters of China. New York: Touchstone. Chang, J. and Halliday, J., 2007. Mao: the unknown story. London: Vintage Books. Clegg, S.R., 2006. Why is organization theory so ignorant? Journal of Management Inquiry, 15, 426–430. Clegg, S., Courpasson, D., and Phillips, N., 2006. Power and organizations. London: Sage. Clegg, S. and Higgins, W., 1989. Better expert than orthodox: reply to Shenkar. Organization Studies, 10 (2), 253–258. Clegg, S.R., Kornberger, M., and Pitsis, T., 2011. Managing and Organizations: an introduction to theory and practice. 3rd ed. London: Sage. Clegg, S., Pina e Cunha, M., and Rego, A., 2012. The theory and practice of Utopia in a total institution: the pineapple panopticon. Organization Studies, 33 (12), 1735–1757. Clegg, S., et al., 2013. Mundane objects and the banality of evil: the sociomateriality of a death camp. Journal of Management Inquiry, 22 (3), 325–340. Clemens, E.S. and Cook, J.M., 1999. Politics and institutionalism: explaining durability and change. Annual Review of Sociology, 25, 441–466. Deleuze, G., 1969. Logique du Sens. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Deroy, X. and Clegg, S., 2015. Back in the USSR: introducing recursive contingency into institutional theory. Organization Studies, 36 (1), 73–90. Dikotter, F., 2010. Mao’s great famine. London: Bloomsbury. Douglas, M., 1966. Purity and danger. London: Routledge. Fairbank, J.K., 1992. China: a new history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Garud, R., Hardy, C., and Maguire, S., 2007. Institutional entrepreneurship as embedded agency: an introduction to the special issue. Organization Studies, 28 (7), 957–969. Goffman, E., 1956. The presentation of self in everyday life. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Goldhagen, D.J., 1997. Hitler’s willing executioners. ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. London: Vintage. Gong, X., 1995. Repressive movements and the politics of victimization. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI. Hagan, J. and Rymond-Richmond, W., 2008. The collective dynamics of racial dehumanization and genocidal victimization in Darfur. American Sociological Review, 73, 875–902. Haslam, N., 2006. Dehumanization: an integrative review. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 252–264.


82

A. Chan et al.

Haslam, N. and Loughnan, S., 2014. Dehumanization and infrahumanization. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 399–423. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115045. Hinton, A.L., 2005. Why do they kill? Cambodia in the shadow of genocide. Berkeley, CA: University of Columbia Press. Hinton, C., Barmé, G., and Gordon, R. 2003. Morning sun: a documentary film about the Cultural Revolution in China [online]. Available from: http://www.morningsun.org/ Hua, Y., 2014. China waits for an apology [online]. The New York Times, 9 April. Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/opinion/yu-hua-cultural-revolution-nostal gia.html?hp&rref=opinion [Accessed 15 April 2014] Jisheng, Y., 2012. Tombstone: the untold story of Mao’s great famine. London: Allen Lane. Kershaw, I., 2000. Hitler 1936–1945: nemesis. London: Penguin. Lawrence, T.B. and Suddaby, R., 2006. Institutions and institutional work. In: S. Clegg, C. Hardy, T.B. Lawrence, and W.R. Nord, eds. The SAGE handbook of organization studies. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 215–254. Lawrence, T.B., Leca, B., and Zilber, T.B., 2013. Institutional work: current research, new directions and overlooked issues. Organization Studies, 34 (8), 1023–1033. Lawrence, T.B., Suddaby, R., and Leca, B., 2009. Introduction: theorizing and studying institutional work. In: T. Lawrence, R. Suddaby, and B. Leca, eds. Institutional work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–28. Lee, C.K. and Zhang, Y., 2013. The power of instability: unraveling the microfoundations of bargained authoritarianism in China. American Journal of Sociology, 118 (6), 1475–1508. Li, Z.S., 1994. The private life of Chairman Mao, trans. Tai Hung-chao. New York: Random House. Lüthi, L., 2008. The Vietnam War and China’s third-line defense planning before the cultural revolution, 1964–1966. Journal of Cold War Studies, 10 (1), 25–51. Macfarquhar, R. and Schoenhals, M., 2006. Mao’s last revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mann, M., 2000. Were the perpetrators of genocide ‘ordinary men’ or ‘real Nazis’? Results from fifteen hundred biographies. Holocaust Genocide Studies, 14 (3), 331–366. Marti, I. and Fernandez, P., 2013. The institutional work of oppression and resistance: learning from the Holocaust. Organization Studies, 34 (8), 1195–1223. Milgram, S., 1974. Obedience to authority: an experimental view. New York: Harper and Row. Owens, P.B., Su, Y., and Snow, D.A., 2013. Social scientific inquiry into genocide and mass killing: from unitary outcome to complex processes. Annual Review of Sociology, 39, 69–84. Phillips, N. and Lawrence, T.B., 2012. The turn to work in organization and management theory: some implications for strategic organization. Strategic Organization, 10 (3), 223–230. Pina e Cunha, M., Clegg, S., and Rego, A., 2014. The ethical speaking of objects: ethics and the ‘object-ive’ world of Khmer Rouge young comrades. Journal of Political Power, 7 (1), 35–61. Sacks, H., 1972. An initial investigation of the usability of conversational data for doing sociology. In: D. Sudnow, ed. Studies in social interaction. New York: Free Press, 31–74. Sacks, H., 1992. Lectures of conversations, Vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell. Schoenhals, M., ed., 1996. China’s cultural revolution: not a dinner party. New York: M. E. Sharpe. Scott-Heron, G., 1970. The revolution will not be televised. . A new black poet – small talk at 125th and Lenox. New York: Flying Dutchman Records. Shenkar, O., 1984. Is bureaucracy inevitable? The Chinese experience. Organization Studies, 5 (4), 289–306. Shenkar, O., 1989. Rejoinder to Clegg and Higgins: The Chinese case and the radical school in Organization Studies. Organization Studies, 10 (1), 117–122. Silverman, D., 2013. Doing qualitative research. London: Sage. Spence, J., 1999. Mao Zedong. New York: Viking.



83

Stokes, P. and Gabriel, Y., 2010. Engaging with genocide: the challenge for organization and management studies. Organization, 17, 461–480. Su, Y., 2011. Collective killings in rural China during the cultural revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sudnow, D., 1972. Studies in social interaction. New York: Free Press. The Economist, 2013. Mao Zedong. Merry Mao-mas! The Economist, 7 December. Available from: http://www.economist.com/news/china/21591186-chairmans-birthdaymonth-will-put-xi-jinping-test-merry-mao-mas Tilly, C., 2003. The politics of collective violence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Valentino, B.A., 2004. Final solutions: mass killing and genocide in the 20th century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. White, L., 1989. Policies of chaos: the organizational causes of violence in China’s Cultural Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Yan, J. and Gao, G., 1996. Turbulent decade: a history of the culturalrevolution. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Yang, K., 1995. Cultural revolution museum: pictorial works, Vols. 1–2. Hong Kong: Tian Di Books. Zedong, Mao, 1964. Mao Zhu Xi Yu Lu (Quotations from Chairman Mao). People’s Republic of China: Liberation Army General Political Department. Zimbardo, P., 2007. The Lucifer effect: understanding how good people turn evil. New York: Random House.