“learn from the poor and lower-middle peasants.” Quite a few were merely sent to the counties immediately adjacent to the city from which they came. Others, however, were sent over long distances. Large groups from Shanghai, for instance, were made to settle in Heilongjiang, the northernmost province in the Northeast. This rustication was in theory permanent, although the vast majority of these people managed to stream back to the cities in the late 1970s, after Mao’s death and the purge of his radical followers.

The system of medical care was also revamped. Serious efforts were made to force urban-based medical staffs to devote more effort to serving the needs of the peasants. This involved both the reassignment of medical personnel to rural areas and, more important, a major attempt to provide short-term training to rural medical personnel called “barefoot doctors.” This latter initiative placed at least a minimal level of medical competence in many Chinese villages; ideally, the referral of more-serious matters was to be made to higher levels. Another prong of the effort in the medical arena was to place relatively greater stress on the use of Chinese traditional medicine, which relied more heavily on locally available herbs and on such low-cost treatments as acupuncture. Western medicine was simply too expensive and specialized to be used effectively throughout China’s vast hinterlands.

The Cultural Revolution was primarily an urban political phenomenon, and

thus it had a highly uneven effect on the peasants. Some villages, especially those near major cities, became caught up in the turmoil, but many peasants living in more-remote areas experienced less interference from higher-level bureaucratic authorities than would normally have been the case.

Nevertheless, there were two dimensions of the Cultural Revolution that did seriously affect peasants’ lives. First, the country adopted a policy of encouraging local rural self-sufficiency in foodstuffs. This policy stemmed from ideological and security considerations, and it had begun before the onset of the Cultural Revolution. Its major consequence was a stress on grain production so great that a quite irrational and uneconomical cropping pattern emerged. Second, great stress was placed on separating income from the amount of work performed by a peasant. Pressure was applied to raise the unit of income distribution to the brigade rather than the team (the former was several times larger than the latter), and an increasing share of the collective income was to be distributed on the basis of welfare and political criteria rather than on the basis of the amount of work performed.

Struggle for the Premiership

As these programmatic aspects of the Cultural Revolution were being put into place and regularized, the political battle to determine who would inherit power at the top continued and intensified.

Tensions first surfaced at a meeting of the Central Committee in the summer of 1970, when Chen Boda, Lin Biao, and their supporters made a series of remarks that angered Mao Zedong. Mao then purged Chen as a warning to Lin. At the end of 1970 Mao also initiated a criticism of Lin’s top supporters in the military forces, calling them to task for their arrogance and unwillingness to listen to civilian authority. The situation intensified during the spring of 1971 until Lin Biao’s son, Lin Liguo, evidently began to put together plans for a possible coup against Mao should this prove the only way to save his father’s position.

During this period, Zhou Enlai engaged in extremely delicate and secret diplomatic exchanges with the United States, and Mao agreed to a secret visit to Beijing by the U.S. national security adviser Henry Kissinger in July 1971. That visit was one of the more dramatic events of the Cold War era and laid the groundwork for U.S. Pres. Richard M. Nixon’s trip to China the following February. At a time when the Vietnam War continued to blaze, China and the United States took major steps toward reducing their mutual antagonism in the face of the Soviet threat. Lin Biao strongly opposed this opening to the United States—probably in part because it would strengthen the political hand of its key architect in China, Zhou Enlai—and the Kissinger visit thus amounted to a major defeat for Lin.

In September 1971 Lin died in a plane crash in Mongolia in what the Chinese

assert was an attempt to flee to the Soviet Union. The Chinese high military command who had served under Lin was purged in the weeks following his death.

Lin’s demise had a profoundly disillusioning effect on many people who had supported Mao during the Cultural Revolution. Lin had been the high priest of the Mao cult, and millions had gone through tortuous struggles to elevate this chosen successor to power and throw out his “revisionist” challengers. They had in this quest attacked and tortured respected teachers, abused elderly citizens, humiliated old revolutionaries, and, in many cases, battled former friends in bloody confrontations. The sordid details of Lin’s purported assassination plot and subsequent flight cast all this in the light of traditional, unprincipled power struggles, and untold millions concluded that they had simply been manipulated for personal political purposes.

Initially, Zhou Enlai was the major beneficiary of Lin’s death, and from late 1971 through mid-1973 he tried to nudge the system back toward stability. He encouraged a revival and improvement of educational standards and brought numerous people back into office. China began again to increase its trade and other links with the outside world, while the domestic economy continued the forward momentum that had begun to build in 1969. Mao blessed these general moves but remained wary lest they call into question the basic value of having launched the Cultural Revolution in the first place. In Maoist thought it had

always been possible for formerly wayward individuals to reform under pressure and again assume power.

During 1972 Mao suffered a serious stroke, and Zhou learned that he had a fatal cancer. These developments highlighted the continued uncertainty over the succession. In early 1973 Zhou and Mao brought Deng Xiaoping back to power in the hope of grooming him as a successor. But Deng had been the second most-important victim purged by the radicals during the Cultural Revolution, and his reemergence made Jiang Qing, by then head of the radicals, and her followers desperate to return things to a more radical path. From mid-1973, Chinese politics shifted back and forth between Jiang and her followers—later dubbed the Gang of Four—and the supporters of Zhou and Deng. The former group favoured political mobilization, class struggle, anti-intellectualism, egalitarianism, and xenophobia, while the latter promoted economic growth, stability, educational progress, and a pragmatic foreign policy. Mao tried unsuccessfully to maintain a balance among these different forces while continuing in vain to search for a suitable successor.

The balance tipped back and forth— nudged by Mao first this way, then that—between the two groups. The radicals gained the upper hand from mid-1973 until mid-1974, during which time they whipped up a campaign that used criticism of Lin Biao and Confucius as an allegorical vehicle for attacking Zhou and his policies. By July 1974, however,

economic decline and increasing chaos made Mao shift back toward Zhou and Deng. With Zhou hospitalized, Deng assumed increasing power from the summer of 1974 through the late fall of 1975. During this time Deng sought (with Zhou’s full support) to put the Four Modernizations (of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defense) at the top of the country’s agenda. To further this effort, Deng continued to rehabilitate victims of the Cultural Revolution, and he commissioned the drafting of an important group of documents much like those developed in 1960–62. They laid out the basic principles for work in the party, industry, and science and technology. Their core elements were anathema to the radicals, who used their power in the mass media and the propaganda apparatus to attack Deng’s efforts.

The radicals finally convinced Mao that Deng’s policies would lead eventually to a repudiation of the Cultural Revolution and even of Mao himself. Mao therefore sanctioned criticism of these policies in the wall posters that were a favourite propaganda tool of the radicals. Zhou died in January 1976, and Deng delivered his eulogy. Deng then disappeared from public view and was formally purged (with Mao’s backing) in April. The immediate reason for Deng’s downfallwasagroupofmassivedemonstrations in Beijing and other cities that took advantage of the traditional Qingming festival to pay homage to Zhou’s memory and thereby challenge the radicals.