Re-examining the Theories on Factional Exclusion in Maoist China

• In Event: Poster Session: Politics and History & International History and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Politics and History

Abstract

Scholars consider the rise of factional politics as key to understanding Party politics during the Maoist period (1949-1976). A number of theories have been devised to explain the puzzling phenomenon of why Chinese policy-makers deviated from pragmatic policy making and administrative routine to engage in wide-ranging political campaigns aimed at excluding factional enemies. Scholars often resolve this puzzle by arguing factionalism arose because policy making processes generated divergent interests and views which then evolved into factions. The standard interpretation is that an absence of common commitments and the limited effectiveness of “formal rules, compliance procedures and standard operational practices” led to a factional politics in which policy-makers formed factions as a means to attain their goals.
In posing such arguments, these scholars take faction building to be a strategy employed to gain resources for competing with others. In most interpretations, leaders’ personal characteristics determined factional opposition, and success or failure in faction struggle was determined by the ability of those leaders to win over others. Such a model posits self-interested actors competing over personal goals, where success or failure is contingent on personal characteristics, individual capacities, and chosen strategies.
This article moves beyond this view of factionalism in Chinese politics. It takes as its empirical case one of those most often cited in favor of the standard view, namely, the focal case of the attack on Peng Dehuai’s “faction” at the Lushan Conference of 1959. This conference, which convened from June 2 to August 16, with the participation of most of the CCP Central Committee members, has attracted much scholarly attention because it was the setting for an abrupt change of theme, from “correcting Great Leap Forward [hereafter GLF] policy mistakes caused by radical leftist thought (jiuzuo)” to an “anti-rightest (fanyou)” campaign. This change was accompanied by the ‘purge’ of Peng Dehuai’s faction followed by an anti-right-oriented movement that swept the whole Party . The conference is often taken as a prime case illustrating how personal conflicts between actors such as Peng Dehuai and Mao Zedong led Mao to choose factional condemnation as a means to attain his goals. By reconsidering the course of events at the Lushan Conference, this paper reexamines standard theories about factional politics during the Maoist period and develops an alternative to them.
My explanation challenges the view that factional exclusion was a strategic means employed by actors to attain personal goals when competing with others. It argues that the construction and condemnation of factions were consequences of an integration process in which actors integrated their discrete personal experiences and perceived phenomena with the cultural framework that unified meaning, norm and justification for their actions. In building this alternative explanation, my research shifts the focus from the personal strategies, purposiveness, motivations, and resources of factional actors, to broader strategies of rule with antecedents in Chinese history where ideology and dynamic processes through which collective meanings are generated play greater roles. My analysis of this integration process sheds light on the imaginary and performative features of the CCP’s central decision making dynamics. In doing so, it offers an account that is quite different from the common pragmatic image of Chinese policy makers.
I build this argument using original sources to construct a new interpretation of the factional politics at the Lushan Conference. I argue that the construction and exclusion of factions at Lushan were not the result of a competition for power by actors such as Mao Zedong and Peng Dehuai. Rather the very concept of factionalism, adopted both by Mao Zedong and the other conference participants, including those accused of being members of factions, was created in line with a script generated by Mao to resolve the collective action problems facing the Party. This script led the participants in the conference to reimagine themselves as engaged in factional struggle within the Party, suggesting to each of them the roles they should play in the course of that struggle for the purpose of resisting class enemies. Factional politics did not arise spontaneously out of personal conflicts, but reflected the construction of a collective imaginary organized around the concept of “factional politics.”
By tracing the historical process whereby the condemnation of factions arose at the Lushan Conference my paper reexamines current actor-centered theories in the dimensions of Mao’s agentic imaginary, conference participants’ meaningful interaction during collective performance, and the reproductive mechanism of factional politics.

Author

• Yinan Luo, Tsinghua University