The silent appearances during the eight receptions of the revolutionary masses had elevated the image of Mao Zedong as the “great helmsman, great leader, great commander, and great teacher” of the Chinese Revolution to previously unfathomed heights. Simultaneously, the CCP’s most prestigious brand symbol had become devoid of a clear-cut message. Mao had not provided the movement with a blueprint of how the Cultural Revolution was to be conducted, nor had he delivered any speeches in public that would have offered a coherent vision of his aims. Party cadres and masses could only rely on the often vague official guidelines published in the party press and either risk offering their interpretation or wait for the seldom impartial exegesis conducted by members of Mao’s camarilla. During the course of the movement, the instrumental character of the cult serving as a means to mobilize the masses and to strike down holders of party offices came to be widely recognized. The raids of high party officials’ homes had supplied Red Guard organizations with original Mao texts that had not been censored and reworked by the party authorities. By publishing his often coarse and musing comments, deleted in the official versions, these texts added a number of new aspects to the sacrosanct image of Mao fostered in the party media and provided the base for interpretations focused on immediate political instrumentability. The loss of the party’s exegetical monopoly led to the emergence of contradictory and conflated usages of Mao’s image and words by different groups, of “waving the Red Flag to knock down the Red Flag” (dazhe hongqi fan hongqi). Regaining control necessitated the reestablishment of authoritative guidelines about which texts and policy lines were to be studied. With the party organizations rendered by and large defunct, the only way of establishing order was reliance on the organizational capacities of the PLA.