'Politics first' - The Maoist state and the political process during the cultural revolution

This article looks at the early period of Gordon White's engagement with Ch ina and the party-state. Gordon and Marc Blecher examined the impact of the Cultural Revolution on the politics of a basic level technical unit. They looked beyond the theatre and iconography of the Maoist project, with its p ersonalisation of power and politicisation of society, to explain why the t echnical unit did not succumb to the ideological demands for a radical tran sformation.