Revolutionary Committee (PRC) - Role During The Cultural Revolution

Role During The Cultural Revolution

With the decision of the central leadership to support the concept of revolutionary committees, from February 1967 onwards mass organisations were encouraged to ally with cadres and the army to establish this new type of government. However, by the end of April 1967, only six of China's twenty-seven provinces (Beijing, Shanghai, Heilongjiang, Shanxi, Guizhou and Shandong) had established revolutionary committees with official approval, due to the continued resistance by old CCP organisations and the lack of agreement amongst mass organisations and the PLA over which party cadres were appropriate choices for the committees. By the end of 1967, only two more revolutionary committees (in Inner Mongolia and in the city of Tianjin) had been formed, despite a call from Mao in September for the forging of these alliances.

Following the founding of nine more revolutionary committees (including in Fujian and Jiangxi provinces) by March, in the summer of 1968, as the Red Guard movement was virtually extinguished by PLA suppression, in an effort to restore some unity to the Cultural Revolution there was another drive by the leadership to establish provincial level revolutionary committees. As a result, by the end of September 1968, all of China's provinces and autonomous regions had provincial-level organisations in place (with the last revolutionary committee being formed in Xinjiang province), and these groups were given the task of facilitating the establishment of similarly structured committees at a district, county and municipal level.

The majority of revolutionary committees created rapidly came to be dominated by the PLA, because the army had military force at its disposal to enforce its will. For example, in the leadership of the revolutionary committee in Shanghai, seven out of the thirteen members were army officers. Twenty out of twenty-nine provincial revolutionary committees were chaired PLA officers, and in several provinces PLA soldiers chaired up to 98% of revolutionary committees above the county level. More often than not, in the interests of stability and order, the PLA allied with cadres on the revolutionary committees against the more radical organisations of the masses. Therefore, at the end of September 1968, only revolutionary committees in Shaanxi and Hubei provinces were chaired by civilians. Furthermore, the majority of those that sat on the revolutionary committees as representatives of the people were those who had had a stake in the pre-Cultural Revolution order of things rather than radicals from the movement itself.

By 1969, it was also the case that both urban and rural revolutionary committees at all levels quickly became subordinate to existing or revived Party committees. The leadership of both organisations was often almost identical, and revolutionary committees became little more than instruments of the Party committees' bidding. This was particularly evident with the factory revolutionary committees- heralded as one of the great achievements of the Cultural Revolution, they were often little more than bureaucratic extensions of Party power.