Andrew Walder's volume is a remarkable piece of scholarship of intellectual honesty and rigor. Backtracking over terrain that he has helped map, Walder returns to the notion that the political cleavages dividing Mao-era society drew from social ties forged between the formal hierarchy of party organizations and the networks of political loyalists on whom they depended in the workplace. The author acknowledges that he began his research on the Beijing Red Guard movement by extrapolating this model, successfully applied in his earlier work, to China's universities. Accordingly, he expected to find that the so-called conservative factions during the Cultural Revolution arose from networks of stalwart party members and political activists seeking to defend their party organizations from offensive attacks, whereas “radical” Red Guard factions drew their primary support from the ranks of the excluded and marginalized. However, Walder discovered that student political allegiances were defined not by putative class background,...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
