| Why was the Chinese army during the Maoist era so deeply involved in politics but failed to take over the highest party authority? The answer is found in the system of party-army blending, originated in the revolutionary history and maintained by the post-revolutionary party-state. In such a system, military participation in politics is intrinsically required. The party ruled. Yet, it did not do so through organizational controls or military professional ethics but rather through the integration of military elites into the party leadership.; In testing the validity of this theory by examining six major cases of leadership conflicts during the Maoist era, the study reveals much of the factional politics at the top level. The cases show how the blending caused the military elites to be involved in political struggles to maintain or increase their political power, and how the same blending gave them a close identification with the party regime and thus prevented them from taking a united position against the civilian leaders. The party-army relations in the Maoist era underwent three major shifts. Each time it correlated with intra-party, factional conflicts. The basic factional structure of the CCP leadership is seen as a triangle in which Mao Zedong performed a major role in playing the civilian and military elites against each other to maintain his own supremacy. The party-army blending did not eliminate civil-military conflicts. On the contrary, it was a chief source of factional struggles. |
