[4] 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).
[2] It sought to emulate the Paris Commune as the historical example of popular power and argued that China's "new bureaucratic bourgeoisie" would have to be destroyed to establish a genuinely egalitarian society.
[2] Historian Maurice Meisner writes that one of its inspirations may have been Qi Benyu, one of the last ultra-left intellectuals remaining in the Cultural Revolution Group (and who was purged in 1968 around the same time authorities suppressed the Shengwulian).
"[11] As Meisner summarized:[12] The Shengwulian combined the original ideals of the Cultural Revolution with the theory of a new bureaucratic ruling class, a notion Mao had briefly entertained but abandoned ...
argued that the central conflict in China during the Cultural Revolution was not between Mao Zedong's proponents and opponents, or between the proletariat and the former wealthy, but instead between the masses and a "Red capitalist class" that was "decadent" and impeding historical progress.
[15] 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?]