Levers of Power: Careers 1949–66

Abstract

The Red Guards’ assessment of the tremendous power wielded by three of the most prominent of the sixty-one prison cadres was not inaccurate. However their conclusions about how, and for what purposes, this power was exercised are far more questionable. Bo Yibo, An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen and Liu Lantao, plus a significant number of their 1930s Caolanzi colleagues, occupied the highest echelons of some of the major functional systems of the party and government apparatus, covering the spheres of economics, organization and personnel, theory and propaganda.² The 1956 Eighth Central Committee saw Bo’s rise to alternate membership status on the Politburo and Liu Lantao’s to alternate membership of the party’s Secretariat. An Ziwen and Yang Xianzhen were Central Committee members (Yang was first appointed alternate member, then promoted to full member in 1958).

Big renegade Po I-po … alternate member of the Central Political Bureau, Vice Premier of the State Council, and Chairman of the State Economic Commission. He controlled the industrial and communications fronts and the lifeline of the national economy.

Big renegade An Tzu-wen controlled the Central Organization Department. He collected demons and monsters … in organizational preparation for Liu Shao-ch’i’s capitalist restoration.

Big renegade Yang Hsien-chen monopolized the Central Higher Party School, in an attempt to corrupt and reform our Party from the ideological front.

(Chunlei [Spring Thunder], 13 April 1967)¹