Shengwulian

The Shengwulian was formed in 1967 during the Cultural Revolution, at a stage when the overall political trends were moving away from mass political movement. It arose in Hunan province. An organization with loose structure and fluid membership, its ranks included People's Liberation Army veterans, "Black Devils" (victims of political campaigns, especially people categorized as bourgeois rightists in the 1950s), and rusticated urban youth. It had ties with economistic groups and drew broad popular support in Hunan from small neighborhood cooperatives (where wages were generally inferior compared to the state-sector industry). The Shengwulian comprised more than 20 such organizations, which coordinated their activities through a Central Committee (where a representative from each constituent organization sat) and a smaller standing committee. Ultimately, the Shengwulian was denounced, including by Kang Sheng, who denigrated the group as "anarchists" and "Trotskyists," and suppressed by the Chinese leadership. == Ideology ==

The Shengwulian was a self-styled ultra-left group. The Shengwulian opposed revolutionary committees, arguing that the committees failed to transform the political system and had the practical effect of excluding radical Red Guards from power. The group's tone "was one of frustration at the limitations of the Cultural Revolution, which the Shengwulian faulted for holding back from a structural solution to China's political problems." As Meisner summarized: Maoist leadership rejected these ideas, but the Shengwulian's views nonetheless spread beyond its local environment in China and also into the West. Its legacy is one of creative re-interpretation of the official doctrine arising during the Cultural Revolution. It was passed hand-to-hand among Rebel Red Guards, spread by authorities as "material to be criticized," and reached a readership of many hundreds of thousands during the Cultural Revolution. == Academic analysis ==

Sociologist Andrew G. Walder writes that the Shengwulian's opposition to a "red capitalist class" "did not issue from a coalition of the marginalized, but [was] instead the product of a split over tactics within the rebel movement, a rhetorical framing of diehard resistance that was not widely shared even within the splinter faction that generated the [Whither China?] essay." According to Jonathan Unger, the Shengwulian became the Cultural Revolution's most famous ultra-left grouping. == Notes ==