Runaway State-Sponsored Movement: How the CCRG Failed to Contain Beijing’s Red Guard Factional Warfare, 1966–1968

Junliang Xu, New York University

Why did party-state elites lose control of the movement they helped launch during the early Cultural Revolution? This article examines the Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG), a Mao-appointed body with ideological monopoly that initially steered Beijing university students against work teams and bureaucratic targets but failed to halt factional violence once contention turned inward among its loyalists. Drawing on 715 archival documents coded into 225 CCRG-faction meetings, I combine bipartite network analysis with close reading of directives and factional publications to argue that the CCRG's selective ideological endorsement through particularistic patronage simultaneously enabled early mobilization but produced later failure due to unintended incentive decoupling: factional boundaries hardened and the immediate interests of factions decoupled from any imperative to obey central commands as the cost structure was altered by ideological certification. When contention shifted to zero-sum competition over institutional vacuums, unilateral restraint became costly while defiance carried few credible sanctions. Factions were able to maintain rhetorical loyalty to Maoist authority while disregarding cease-fire orders—a conformity without compliance. This mechanism clarifies the limits of ideological steering in contentious arenas and contributes to theories of state power, ideological authority, and contentious politics.

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 Presented in Session 179. Red Guards, Elite Conflict, and the Cultural Revolution