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Part of the Mao faction's difficulties no doubt turn on straightforward personal power politics. Until the purge began, Liu Shao-chi had long been ranked No. 2 behind Mao, and was his heir apparent. Like any politician, Liu surely resented Lin's vault into the position of dauphin—and is fighting to cut him back down to size. In such a battle, Liu commands considerable resources. Mao may have been the sun shining on Red Chinese Communism, but in the last two decades it was Liu who got down on the ground and cultivated the party apparatus. All seven governors of the provinces of China are Liu's appointees; and hundreds, if not thousands, of lesser party and government officials owe their jobs to Liu, whatever their lip service to Mao.
Even all that would hardly suffice to protect Liu if Mao had chosen to act quickly and decisively in a classic purge. But he did not, for Mao's purge is part and parcel of a far vaster dream that is contained in his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It is the romantic nostalgia of an aging revolutionary who wants to turn back the clock. Mao moved when he saw that China had begun to show signs of the same mellowing of aspirations, the same desire for material well-being above ideology, that to his horror he had watched overtake Russia in the years after Stalin. Mao does not want to go the way of Stalin in history after his death, nor does he want China to go the way of "bourgeois, revisionist" Russia. "He seeks nothing less than the rejuvenation of a great revolution," says Hong Kong Sinologist Mark Gayn, "the rebirth in middle age of the drive, the passion, the selflessness and the discipline it had in its youth a third of a century ago."
No Tape Recording. Mao chose the People's Liberation Army, as one instrument to spread the revolution, and put Defense Minister Lin Piao to work preparing it for its mission of spreading the gospel—and trying to ensure its loyalty, which is the key to much that happens in Red China. Always far more than a fighting machine, the P.L.A engages in everything from road and dam construction to social services to making propaganda movies. A year before the Revolution got under way, Lin abolished ranks in the P.L.A., a hint of how far back toward some vision of beneficent anarchy Mao intended to turn the Chinese clock.