Violent Struggle

[19][20] After receiving the support from Mao Zedong himself, the "Shanghai model" spread to other regions of China where factions began to grab power from the local governments, establishing the revolutionary committees.

[21] The violent struggles across China escalated significantly in the summer of 1967 after Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong, promoted the idea of "Wen Gong Wu Wei (文攻武卫)", meaning "attack with reason, defend with force".

Factional conflict between Red Guard and rebel organizations happened for a wide range of reasons: some purely for the seizure and dominance of political power, others were fought over pre-existing class resentments, while still more struggled to stay afloat in the turmoil of changing alliances.

In Guangdong, for instance, fighting between student-based Red Guards was often predicated on the ability to apply to join the Communist Youth League and perceived prospects for upward advancement.

Wading into a complicated web of shifting alliances and political positions, local army units often had to contend with the dual tasks of interpreting contradictory orders from above, and then actually carrying them out within the constraints of chaotic regional conditions.

An illustrative example is the situation in Guangzhou, where a group of 'radicals' collapsed into two distinct factions over the question of whether power should be seized immediately (and thus minimizing both public participation and shakeup of party officials) or later on with a broader political base to draw from.

[25] Attempts to win elite favor could lead competing factions to engage in a spiral of increasingly radical acts that were detached from the core ideological beliefs of its members, as happened with escalating violent confrontations at Tsinghua University throughout 1967 and 1968.

[29] Nevertheless, at varying points the passion and political convictions of factions participants were equally important determiners and should not dismissed in favor of wholly cynical and pragmatic motivations.

However, after the Wuhan incident on July 20, 1967, Jiang Qing thought that counter-revolutionaries appeared in the military and thus publicly proposed the idea of "Wen Gong Wu Wei (文攻武卫)", or "attack with reason, defend with force".

[22][23] In the summer of 1968, the violent struggles had grown out of control in a number of places, Ultimately, the PLA was the only organization which was capable of restoring order to the country, and so the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was forced to issue several announcements to stop the battles.

Factional violence on a local level declined precipitously after this point, and the purges carried out during the Cleansing the Class Ranks campaign would herald the end of this portion of the Cultural Revolution.