Ideology and Organization in Post-Mao China

At the outset of the Cultural Revolution, there was a tendency in some quarters to conclude that all previous conceptualizations of the Chinese Communist political system were flawed, either because they had failed to predict this momentous upheaval or because the People's Republic of China (PRC) by 1966 had so radically departed from its previous incarnation. Inasmuch as the Chinese themselves have come to characterize the entire decade as a deviation from the historical tradition from which they now seek to derive their current state of affairs, these pre-1966 formulations may once again be perceived to have explanatory utility, while conceptualizations based on the Cultural Revolution fade into irrelevance-if, that is, the current leadership has succeeded in recapturing the past. The purpose of this article is to relate post-Mao macropolitical developments to one of the more influential conceptualizations of the pre1966 system, Franz Schurmann's discussion of the relationship between ideology and organization. ' Schurmann's work has drawn telling criticism as well as praise,2 and an essay in diachronic comparison of this sort need not assume it to be a fully satisfactory theoretical formulation.3 I do,