Revolutionary committee (China)

As the spirit of the Cultural Revolution spread across China in the latter half of 1966, it soon became clear to the Maoist leadership in Beijing that the ability of local party organizations and officials to resist the attempts by the Red Guards to remove them from power was greater than had been thought.

[1] As a result, Mao Zedong proposed dramatic seizures of power by the various Red Guard and workers' groups and the establishment of new local governments based on Karl Marx's Paris Commune model.

[5][6] With the decision of the leadership to support the concept of revolutionary committees, from February 1967 onwards mass organizations were encouraged to ally with cadres and the army to establish this new type of government.

[20] However some, such as Dongping Han, have argued that, at the local level at least, the Revolutionary Committees were an important tool of popular power, accountable and representative of the people throughout the Cultural Revolution.

[23] However, they were maintained for their increasingly effective bureaucratic role (they were more efficient than the conventional Party apparatus of government[24]) and as the leadership did not want to undermine the ideological success of the Cultural Revolution.

This congress ratified a new version of the constitution of the People's Republic of China, in which the revolutionary committees were established as permanent fixtures of the country's administration, but they were not given any role in the formulation of policy.