Chang Ch'un-Ch'iao and Shanghai's January Revolution by Andrew G. Walder

Author:Andrew G. Walder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

VIII

CHANG CH’UN-CH’IAO AND THE POLITICS OF DEMOBILIZATION

By early March the Shanghai press declared that Keng Chin-chang’s organization was disintegrating and that all along it had been manipulated by the old MPC.1 Articles explaining the significance of the Revolutionary Committee stressed the importance of the PLA, of Public Security, and of proletarian dictatorship. Student liaison offices, most notably the vociferously anti-Chang Chingkangshan, were ordered to close down and leave town.2 With the unified opposition to his leadership eliminated as a powerful force, Chang could set himself once again to the task of restoring normal social order and production by eliminating those unforseen disruptions that had occurred during the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai—a task he had haltingly begun in the first days of January.

Now Chang Ch’un-ch’iao, with the support of the Workers’ Headquarters, in effect continued the series of demobilization campaigns that he had begun in Shanghai in early January 1967. Unfailingly couched in radical sounding rhetoric and always presented as higher stages in the attacks on the bourgeois headquarters, these campaigns were actually aimed at achieving eminently practical goals—establishing labor discipline, sidetracking economic demands, returning youths and workers to the countryside, halting attacks on basic level cadres of all types, and returning students to school—all vital parts of a program to restore Shanghai’s paralyzed economy and disrupted social order. By no means dogmatically attached to a utopian position, Chang did not hesitate to suppress the growing opposition to these programs from the large, militant sector of Shanghai’s dissident movement—the Red Revolutionaries, the Red Flag Army, the Second Regiment of Workers, and the Workers’ Third Army—the same sector that had presented the old MPC with its most outspoken opposition.

This program was characterized by its attempt to project onto a small handful of powerless former leaders those qualities that Chang wished to combat in the masses themselves. This tactic not only communicated to Shanghai’s population which behavior was intolerable, but it was an explicit attempt to have warring factions unite against a common, albeit symbolic, enemy. Throughout the period calls went out to “promote unity through criticism” by directing the spearhead of criticism away from cadres and mass factions and towards the “top Party persons.”3 The main obstacle of the movement was declared to be “the bourgeois reactionary line, especially the cadre policy of hitting hard at the many” (or, in other words, criticizing and removing large numbers of basic level leaders), and “only by thoroughly criticizing this line can we unite and form a great alliance to carry out the Cultural Revolution.”4 This “criticizing” took the form of a call to “settle accounts” with the former MPC handful, who allegedly had tried to sabotage the Cultural Revolution.5

As part of this effort, a whole series of televised struggle rallies were held in order to expose “the top Party person” and his “deputies” in the Shanghai MPC.6 This coincided with a string of forums, rallies, and editorials proclaiming a “general offensive” of criticism against this handful.7 A simultaneous call went out to “resume the

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