The years 1961–65 did not resemble the three previous ones, despite the persistence of radical labels and slogans. The Chinese themselves were loath to acknowledge the end of the Great Leap period, declaring the validity of the general line of socialist construction and its international revolutionary corollary for one and all.

Reality can be seen, however, in the increasing role of the Chinese military and security personnel. At a top-level meeting of the Military Affairs Committee in October 1960 and at one of the rare plenary sessions of the party’s Central Committee the following January, the elite gave the highest priority to restoring security and national order. Party recruitment procedures were tightened, and a major thought-reform movement was launched within the cadres’ ranks. The Central Committee also established six supraprovincial regional bureaus charged with enforcing obedience to Beijing and bringing the new procedures for control into line with local conditions. The army, now firmly under Lin Biao, took the lead, beginning with a “purification” movement against dissidents within its own ranks. Throughout 1961 and most of 1962, the central officials worked to consolidate their power and to restore faith in their leadership and goals.

By January 1962 Mao had, as he later put it, moved to the “second line” to concentrate “on dealing with questions of the direction, policy, and line of the party and the state.” The “first line” administrative and day-by-day direction of the state had been given to Liu Shaoqi, who had assumed the chairmanship of the People’s Republic of China in 1959 (though Mao retained his position of party chairman); additional responsibilities in the first line were given to Deng Xiaoping, another tough-minded organizer who, as general secretary, was the party’s top administrator. By 1962 Mao had apparently begun to conclude that the techniques used by these comrades in the first line not only violated the basic thrust of the revolutionary tradition but also formed a pattern of error that mirrored what he viewed as the “modern revisionism” of the Soviet Union.

Under Liu and Deng, the CCP during 1960–61 developed a series of documents in major policy areas to try to bring the country out of the rapidly growing crisis. In most instances, these documents were drafted with the assistance of experts who had been reviled during the Great Leap Forward. These documents marked a major retreat from Great Leap radicalism. The communes were to be reduced on the average by about two-thirds so as to make them small enough to link peasants’ efforts more clearly with their remuneration. Indeed, by 1962 in many areas of rural China, the collective system in agriculture had broken down completely, and individual farming was revived. Policy toward literature, art, and motion pictures permitted a “thaw” involving treatment of a far broader range of subjects and a revival of many older, prerevolutionary artistic forms. The new program in industry strengthened the hands of managers and made a worker’s efforts more closely attuned to his rewards. Similar policies were adopted in other areas. In general, China during 1961–65 did a remarkable job of reviving the economy, at least regaining the level of output of 1957 in almost all sectors.

These policies raised basic questions about the future direction of the revolution. While almost all top CCP leaders had supported the launching of the Great Leap, there was disagreement over the lessons to be learned from the movement’s dramatic failure. The Great Leap had been intended both as a means of accelerating economic development and as a vehicle for achieving a mass ideological transformation. All leaders agreed in its aftermath that a mobilization approach to economic development was no longer appropriate to China’s conditions. Most also concluded that the age of mass political campaigns as an instrument to remold the thinking of the public was past. Mao and a few of his supporters, however, still viewed class struggle and mass mobilization as core ingredients in keeping the revolutionary vision alive.

Mao personally lost considerable prestige over the failure of the Great Leap—and the party’s political and organizational apparatus was damaged—but he remained the most powerful individual in China. He proved able time and again to enforce his will on the issues that he deemed to be of top priority. Claims made later, during the Cultural Revolution, that Mao had been pushed aside and ignored during 1961–65 are not supported by the evidence.

Mao was in fact deeply troubled as he contemplated China’s situation during 1961–65. He perceived the Soviet socialist revolution in the years after Stalin’s death in 1953 to have degenerated into “social imperialism.” Mao evidently had been shocked by these developments in the Soviet Union, and the revelation made him look at events in China from a new vantage point. Mao became convinced that China too was headed down the road toward revisionism. He used class struggle and ideological campaigns, as well as concrete policies in various areas, to try to prevent and reverse this slide into revolutionary purgatory. Mao’s nightmare about revisionism played an increasing role in structuring politics in the mid-1960s.

Mao was not the only leader who harbored doubts about the trends in the recovery effort of 1961–65. Others gathered around him and tried to use their closeness to Mao as a vehicle for enhancing their political power. The key individuals involved were Mao’s political assistant of many years, Chen Boda, who was an expert in the realm of ideology; Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who had strong policy views in the cultural sphere; Kang Sheng, whose strength lay both in his understanding of Soviet ideology and in his mastery of Soviet-style secret police techniques; and Lin Biao, who headed the military and tried to make it an ideal type of Maoist organization that combined effectiveness with ideological purity. Each of these people in turn had personal networks and resources to bring to a coalition. While their goals and interests did not entirely coincide, they all could unite on two efforts: enhancing Mao’s power and upsetting Mao’s relations with Liu Shaoqi (then the likely successor to Mao), Deng Xiaoping, and most of the remainder of the party leadership.

Mao took a number of initiatives in domestic and foreign policy during the period. At a major Central Committee plenum in September 1962, he insisted that “class struggle” remain high on the Chinese agenda, even as enormous efforts continued to be made to revive the economy. He also called for a campaign of “socialist education,” aimed primarily at reviving the demoralized party apparatus in the countryside. By 1964 he began to press hard to make the Chinese educational system less elitist by organizing “part-work, part-study” schools that would provide more vocational training. Throughout this period, foreign observers noted what appeared to be some tension between a continuing thread of radicalism in China’s propaganda and a strong pragmatic streak in the country’s actual domestic policies.

The most important set of measures Mao took concerned the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which he and Lin Biao tried to make into a model organization. Events on the Sino-Indian border in the fall of 1962 helped the PLA reestablish discipline and its image. From 1959 to 1962 both India and China, initially as a by-product of the uprising in Tibet, resorted to military force along their disputed border. On October 12, 1962, a week before the Chinese moved troops into disputed border territories as part of the monthlong Sino-Indian War, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru stated that the army was to free all Indian territory of “Chinese intruders.” In the conflict that followed, Beijing’s regiments defeated Indian forces in the border region, penetrating well beyond it. The Chinese then withdrew from most of the invaded area and established a demilitarized zone on either side of the line of control. Most significantly, the leadership seized on the army’s victory and began to experiment with the possibility of using army heroes as the ideal types for popular emulation.

Increasingly preoccupied with indoctrinating its heirs and harking back to revolutionary days, Beijing’s leaders closest in outlook to Mao Zedong and Lin Biao viewed the soldier-communist as the most suitable candidate for the second- and third-generation leadership. Army uniformity and discipline, it was seen, could transcend the divided classes, and all army men could be made to comply with the rigorous political standards set by Mao’s leadership.

Lin Biao developed a simplified and dogmatized version of Mao’s thought—eventually published in the form of the “Little Red Book,” Quotations from Chairman Mao—to popularize Maoist ideology among the relatively uneducated military recruits. As the military forces under Lin increasingly showed that they could combine ideological purity with technical virtuosity, Mao tried to expand the PLA’s organizational authority and its political role. Beginning in 1963, Mao called on all Chinese to “learn from the PLA.” Then, starting in 1964, Mao insisted that political departments modeled on those in the PLA be established in all major government bureaucracies. In many cases, political workers from the PLA itself staffed these new bodies, thus effectively penetrating the civilian government apparatus. Other efforts, such as a national propaganda campaign to learn from a purported army hero, Lei Feng, also contributed to enhancement of the PLA’s prestige.

The militancy of subsequent campaigns to learn from army heroes, or from the PLA as a whole, was echoed in international politics. In a tour of Africa in late 1963 and early 1964, Zhou Enlai startled his hosts by calling for revolution in newly independent states and openly challenging the Soviet Union for the leadership of the Third World. Simultaneously, China challenged the U.S. system of alliances by establishing formal relations with France and challenged the Soviet Union’s system by forming closer ties with Albania.

Beijing’s main target was Moscow. A Soviet-U.S. crisis in Cuba (October 1962) had coincided with the Sino-Indian struggle, and in both cases the Chinese believed the Soviet Union had acted unreliably and had become “capitulators” of the worst sort. For the next several months, polemicists in Beijing and Moscow publicly engaged in barbed exchanges. When the Soviet Union signed the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty with the United States and Great Britain in August 1963, Chinese articles accused the Soviets of joining an anti-Chinese conspiracy. Confronted by this new strategic situation, the Chinese shifted their priorities to support an anti-foreign line and promote the country’s “self-reliance.” Mao’s calls for “revolutionization” acquired a more nationalistic aspect, and the PLA assumed an even larger place in Chinese political life.

These many-sided trends seemed to collide in 1963 and 1964. With the split in the international communist movement, the party in late 1963 called on intellectuals, including those in the cultural sphere, to undertake a major reformulation of their academic disciplines to support China’s new international role. The initial assignment for this reformulation fell to Zhou Yang, a party intellectual and deputy director of the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department, who tried to enlist China’s intellectuals in the ideological war against Soviet revisionism and in the struggle for rigidly pure political standards. (Less than three years later, however, Zhou Yang was purged as a revisionist, and many intellectuals were condemned as Mao Zedong’s opponents.)

Closely connected with the concerns of the intellectuals were those relating to the party and the Communist Youth League. A drive began to cultivate what one author called “newborn forces,” and by mid-1964 young urban intellectuals were embroiled in a major effort by the Central Committee to promote those forces within the party and league; meanwhile, their rural cousins were buffeted by moves to keep the socialist education campaign under the party’s organizational control through the use of “work teams” and a cadre-rectification movement.

In the summer of 1964, Mao wrote a document titled “On Khrushchev’s Phony Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World,” which summarized most of Mao’s doctrinal principles on contradiction, class struggle, and political structure and operation. This summary provided the basis for the reeducation (“revolutionization”) of all youth hoping to succeed to the revolutionary cause. This high tide of revolutionization lasted until early August, when U.S. air strikes on North Vietnam raised the specter of war on China’s southern border. A yearlong debate followed on the wisdom of conducting disruptive political campaigns during times of external threat.

This period of time has come to be interpreted as one of major decision within China. One ingredient of the debate was whether to prepare rapidly for conventional war against the United States or to continue the revolutionization of Chinese society, which in Mao’s view had fundamental, long-term importance for China’s security. Those who argued for a postponement of the internal political struggle supported more-conventional strategies for economic development and took seriously Soviet calls for “united action” in Vietnam and the establishment of closer Sino-Soviet ties. Their position, it was later alleged, received the backing of the general staff. With the dispatch of about 50,000 logistic personnel to Vietnam after February 1965, factional lines began to divide the military forces according to ideological or national security preferences.

Meanwhile, some members tried to restore rigid domestic controls. Where Mao in May 1963 had called for an upsurge in revolutionary struggle, by the following September other leaders were circumscribing the area of cadre initiative and permitting a free-market system and private ownership of rural plots to flourish. A stifling of the revolutionary upsurge was supposedly evident in regulations of June 1964 for the organization of poor and lower-middle-class associations, and by early 1965 Mao could point to bureaucratic tendencies throughout the rural areas. In a famous document on problems arising in the course of the socialist education campaign, usually referred to as the “Twenty-three Articles,” Mao in January 1965 stated for the first time that the principal enemy was to be found within the party, and he once more proclaimed the urgency of class struggle and mass-line politics.

It was in that period of emphasis on self-reliant struggle that China acquired nuclear weapons. Although the Soviet Union supported Chinese nuclear aims for a time, that effort was taken over completely by the Chinese after June 1959. By 1964 the costs of the program had forced a substantial reduction in other defense costs. China’s first atomic explosion (October 16, 1964) affected the debate by appearing to support Mao’s contention that domestic revolutionization would in no way jeopardize long-term power aspirations and defense capabilities.

Mao’s military thinking, a product of his own civil war experiences and an essential component of his ideology, stressed the importance of military strength through sheer numbers (“people’s war”) during the transition to nuclear status. He felt that preparation for such a war could turn China’s weaknesses into military assets and reduce its vulnerability. Mao’s view of people’s war belittled the might of modern advanced weapons as “paper tigers” but recognized that China’s strategic inferiority subjected it to dangers largely beyond its control. His reasoning thus made a virtue out of necessity in the short run, when China would have to depend on its superior numbers and the morale of its people to defeat any invader. In the long run, however, he held that China would have to have nuclear weapons to deprive the superpowers of their blackmail potential and to deter their aggression against smaller states.

Lin Biao repeated Mao’s position on people’s war, further arguing that popular insurrections against noncommunist governments could succeed only if they took place without substantial foreign assistance. To the extent that a people’s rebellion came to depend on outside support, inevitably their bonds with the local populace would be weakened. When this happened, the rebellion would wither for lack of support. On the other hand, the hardships imposed by relying on indigenous resources would stimulate the comradeship and ingenuity of the insurgents. Equally important, Lin’s statement also indicated a high-level decision for China to remain on the defensive.

Lin’s speech coincided with yet another secret working conference of the Central Committee, in which the Maoist group reissued its call for cultural revolutionization, this time convinced that the effort of 1964 had been deliberately sabotaged by senior party and military officials. Initiated by Mao Zedong and Lin Biao, the purge first struck dissident army leaders, especially the chief of staff; as the power struggle began, China turned its back on the war in Vietnam and other external affairs. The September meeting may be taken as a clear harbinger of what came to be known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.