The first months of 1967 witnessed a drastic widening of the impact of the Cultural Revolution. Middle and high school students had played a dominant part in the early stages of the movement. Now it spread within production units and the countryside after official restrictions had been lifted in December 1966. The CCP leadership effectively allowed for the creation of rival organizations that resulted in violent clashes about resources of power, such as party institutions, propaganda devices, and military equipment. At the same time, Red Guards were to participate in short-term military training to secure the concordance of their thoughts and actions with the aims of the Cultural Revolution. The parallel trends of employing the cult for disciplinary functions and the increasing lack of state control fostered multiple ways of instrumentalizing Mao Zedong’s image for different purposes. Although up to this point the main way of expounding the cult had been Maoist rhetoric, the physical presence of Mao icons, including statues, badges, and images, now grew indomitable, despite the efforts of the CCP Center to restrict the spreading of what was referred to as “formalism” (xingshi zhuyi). The open-textured nature of the revolutionary symbols invoked in different settings was revealed with increasing clarity from mid-1967 onward. To regain control over the factionalized patchwork of revolutionary groups and to quell the growing civil unrest, the CCP returned to the methods of emotional and exegetical bonding. Basically, every Chinese citizen had to take part in the guided study of Mao texts that was organized from central study classes down to household study classes within families.