‘Undercover cadres’ and ‘agents’ are the products of the Liu [Shaoqi], Deng [Xiaoping], Peng [Zhen], and Luo [Ruiqing] counter-revolutionary revisionist line and its aggressive promotion of ‘isolationism’ and ‘mysticism’ in the public security, procuracy, and legal sectors. So-called undercover cadres and agents are, for the most part, landlord, rich peasant, counter-revolutionary, bad, Rightist elements, renegades, tewu, Catholic priests, monks, imams, senior officers in Chiang Kai-shek‘s bandit army, core elements in reactionary political parties and organisations, or degenerate [Communist Party] elements. They form a counter-revolutionary fifth column created to prepare in organisational terms for the restoration of capitalism. From what the masses have brought to light, when utilisation of ‘agents’ peaked in our province, their number in the province as a whole exceeded 28,000. According to the original Public Security Bureau statistics for the second half of 1965, the total number of ‘agents’ in the province that year totalled 2,581.

The unjust court sentencing and execution of poor peasant Dong Changbao and his son, Dong Renhuo, in Yongkang county in 1958 was yet another heinous crime committed by the handful who held power in the old public security, procuracy, and legal sectors and who relied on agents to subject the labouring people to blood-stained oppression. It is also ironclad evidence of the old public security, procuracy, and legal sectors enforcing a bourgeois dictatorship.

In accordance with our great leader Chairman Mao’s teaching that ‘public security organs must conduct more systematic operational work’ and on the basis of stronger Party Committee leadership and implementation of the mass line, covert assets (henceforth to be uniformly referred to as informants rather than as agents) capacity building and utilisation of necessary technical operational instruments are to be reinforced so as to allow us to engage in covert struggle energetically as well as shrewdly and to effectively mitigate and strike at acts of sabotage by tewu, spies, and hidden counter-revolutionary elements. …

Although much can be learned by contrasting the paradigmatic and influential cases of US and French deinstitutionalization, some alternative explanations nevertheless remain. As an analytic check, this chapter tests the argument in two Scandinavian societies, Sweden and Norway, that share much in common and control for those explanations (e.g., statist welfare provision, ethnic homogeneity, a long history of social solidarity, and a powerful trade union movement). Despite the two countries’ similarities, Sweden’s supply of mental health care is significantly lower than that of Norway. The systems diverged in the 1990s, after the enactments of Sweden’s 1995 Psychiatry Reform and Norway’s 1996–7 Mental Health Care Escalation Plan. This chapter contrasts the politics of these two reforms, showing how the absence of a public labor–management coalition produced a negative supply-side policy feedback loop in Sweden and its presence produced a positive loop in Norway. It concludes by assessing the major alternative explanations, including the counterargument that Norway’s access to rich oil revenues over-determined the outcomes in that country.