Runaway State-Sponsored Movement: How the CCRG Failed to Contain Beijing’s Red Guard Factional Warfare, 1966–1968

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: Movements in the Face of Authoritarianism

Abstract

Why did the party-state elites lose control of the state-sponsored movement it helped launch during the early Cultural Revolution? This article examines the Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG), a Mao-appointed body that held an ideological monopoly, that initially effectively steered Beijing university students against work teams and bureaucratic targets but failed to halt the factional violence that ensued once contention turned inward among their loyalists. Drawing on 715 archival documents coded into 233 CCRG–faction meetings and combining relational network evidence with close reading of directives and factional publications, this study argues that the way the CCRG governed through selective ideological endorsement, which enabled them to effectively steer factions initially, nevertheless laid the ground for their later failure. In the initial phase of the movement, which was under CCRG’s control, by publicly certifying some factions as “left” and protecting them from scrutiny, CCRG leaders created segmented patronage ties and centers of protection. These ties were effective for mobilizing attacks on shared enemies, but they also hardened factional boundaries and shifted incentives: Minority factions’ immediate interests in accumulating power and defeating rivals progressively decoupled from any imperative to demonstrate loyalty to an abstract ideological line. When the fight became a competition for power over campus and bureaucratic vacuums in the second phase, unilateral restraint became costly for factions, while defiance carried few credible sanctions with the same patronage remained. As a result, factions maintained rhetorical loyalty to Maoist authority while disregarding CCRG unity and cease-fire orders. The case shed light on failed coordination among state-backed allies, highlighting a mechanism through which statesponsored movements can escape delegated control, underscoring limits of ideological steering in high-uncertainty contentious arenas. This study also makes contributions to theories of state, ideological power, and contentious politics.

Author

• Junliang Xu, New York University