By 1964 Mao Tse-tung had lost effective control over much of the Party hierarchy set up by his “successor,” and also over the state administrative apparatus… Liu Shao-ch'i and his like-minded comrades utilized the Mao cult in theory and slighted Maoism in practice… Mao was convinced that the people and Party rank and file were with him but were misled by his disloyal opposition. … Edgar Snow, “Aftermath of the Cultural Revolution,” in The New Republic, 10 April 1971.

Whatever may have been the objectives of the principal participants in the Cultural Revolution, there can be little doubt that they did not include what turned out to be, at least in the short term, the most striking and significant outcome of the upheaval: the rise of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to a pivotal position in China's power structure. Compelled to intervene in the political process when the disruptive effects of the struggle reached dangerous dimensions, the army gradually ascended to the commanding heights of political power in the provinces, and acquired a substantial voice in the policy-making councils of Peking. When the Ninth Congress of the Party finally met in April 1969 to write the epilogue to the Cultural Revolution, it was the PLA rather than the Party that held most of the key positions of power in China.

The theatrical life of the Chinese in recent years has closely reflected the evolution of Chinese society as a whole since the Cultural Revolution. Although the ninth Party Congress in April 1969 confirmed the success of the Maoist line established in the Cultural Revolution, deciding exactly how to apply that ideological system has not always been easy. Debate has continued in all sections of the community, and is reflected very clearly in the newspapers and media. Amid these debates enough concrete decisions have been reached to begin new cultural activity, largely suspended while the issues were being thrashed out during the Cultural Revolution, and with the passing of time the pace of the revival in the arts has quickened. The resurgence is based on Maoist theory, and it may conseqeuntly be useful to begin with a discussion of how the Chinese are formulating their ideas on what the theatre is all about.

After the Great Leap Forward the Chinese Ministry of Education designed new programmes for teaching and administration. These guidelines, the “1963 Temporary Work Regulations for Full-time Middle and Primary Schools,” which are translated below, were drafted during 1961 and 1962, promulgated in 1963 but only became generally available during the Cultural Revolution when, in 1967, they were reprinted and circulated for criticism, to serve as negative examples for those drawing up new educational reforms. These 1963 regulations were an attempt to structure a school environment in which the teaching and learning of academic subjects would flourish. They provide documentary evidence for the concentration on expertness and “quality” which characterized educational policy during the period between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, the regulations illustrate how the policy-makers defined “quality” education; they describe the specific measures which the authorities felt were necessary to guarantee a school setting conducive to that goal; and they indicate what values the policy-makers were willing to trade-off in pursuit of educational “quality.”