The dilemma of charismatic authority: Mao's cultural revolution in China

This dissertation explains why Mao mobilized a mass rebellion against his own party-state, why and how he was trapped in a dilemma between mass factional war and conservative military rule during the movement, and why he concluded his anti-bureaucratic movement by using the military bureaucracy to repress the mass rebels. Developing Weber's theory of charismatic authority and its routinization tendency, this dissertation argues that the contrasting dimensions and elements of charismatic and bureaucratic authorities generate a simultaneously interdependent and conflicting relationship when these two authorities coexist in a single regime. The Maoist post-revolutionary regime was such a regime, based on a combination of Mao's charismatic authority and the party-state's bureaucratic authority. Mao's intention to maintain his personal charismatic authority conflicted with the bureaucratization tendency of his party-state. From the perspective of this dissertation, Mao's Cultural Revolution was a charismatic attempt to overcome this bureaucratization tendency. However, the movement contained an innate contradiction in that it fought bureaucratization while defending its structural base, the centralized party-state system at the same time. This contradiction, I argue, was rooted in the double identity of Mao as the charismatic leader of a post-revolutionary regime: on the one hand, Mao was the founder and the guardian angel of his party-state; on the other hand, he had to combat its bureaucratization tendency in order to maintain his personal charismatic authority. Mao's concern about the maintenance of his party-state set the limit to the anti-institutional logic of his charismatic authority. This mix of anti-institutional radicalism and institutional conservatism provided space for their appropriation by the mass and bureaucratic forces to pursue their own agendas in implementing Mao's movement. These appropriations generated the radical dynamics of mass factionalism and the conservative mechanism of bureaucratic institutionalization. They interacted with Mao's intervention to generate the cyclical dynamics of the Cultural Revolution and trapped Mao in a real dilemma. Facing the intractable mass factionalism that tended to pull his regime apart, Mao had to repress it through the military bureaucracy in order to maintain his regime.