Prior to the Cultural Revolution, the Chinease government had always walked a fine line between building an effective buracracy and keeping to their ideals of a revolutionary spirit. Many people like Liu Shoqui and Zhou Enlai realized that for China to Modernize it would take a strong, well controled government. Consequently, government actions and intiatives would effectively help to build up this grwoing buracracy, but a revolutionary spin would be put on to make everything fit well into the retoric.In 1966 everything was flipped upside down when the buracracy was torn apart in the Cultural Revolution. During this revolution many people in the government were attacked based on capitalism, revisionism, and rightism. Even with this cultural revolution raging, the nature of government actions and their lip service to communism did not change.
The government used the same means of buracratic response to try to quell the tide of the revolution, but they framed their actions in Mao Zedong thought and rhetoric.In June of 1966, The People's Daily published a big character poster directly attacking party members who were taking the capitalist road. This sent University campuses into a state of chaos. (Schoenhals, 363) In response to this uprising Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping sent work teams to the campuses. This was representative of the governments contradictory policies.
In this case they sent work teams to help direct and dictate the revolutionary fervor of the students.But in reality this was a measure to take control of the campuses from the students and give it back to the party. The work teams were a unit of the governments bureaucracy, but they operated using communist rhetoric to justify their actions. Eventually Liu Shaoqi was branded as an official who took the capitalist road and was kicked out of office, and it is important to note that one of the main charges against him was his use of the work teams in 1966.
By October of 1967 Lin Biao had replaced Liu Shaoqi as the number 2 man in the party, and the entire country had been brought to the brink of Civil War in August(Schoenhals, 365). The government had lost all ability to control the masses, the cities were still in chaos. On October 14, 1967 the government issued the Notification Concerning the Resumption of Classes to Make Revolution in Universities, Middle Schools, and Elementary Schools(Schoenhal, 75).This notification to resume classes urged school administrators and instructors to immediately rework the curriculum to represent revolutionary thought and revolutionary education. This notification also explains that "a majority of teachers and cadres in the schools are comparitivly good.
.. persons who have committed errors in the past should be permitted to come forward and return to work, assuming they have understood their errors and recitified them. "(Notification, Schoenhal 76)
