‘Bloodlines’, Political Consciousness and the CR

The CR was a further example of the violence that plagued the PRC revolutionary system capable of renting asunder its cloak of unity. One of the causes of division was competition between two theories concerning class.

The first concerned revolutionary ‘bloodlines’ and is summed up by slogans used to defend entrenched power such as “if the father was a revolutionary, his son is a hero” and “if the father was a reactionary, his son is a bad egg”. During the CR under this theory there were said to still be five relatively stable red (good) classes and nine relatively stable bad classes (and all with relatively stable heritability especially down the male line):

5 red classes	9 bad classes
Poor and lower middle peasants	Landlords
Workers	Rich Peasants
PLA	Counter-revolutionaries
Revolutionary martyrs	Bad elements
Revolutionary cadres	Rightists
	Traitors
	Spies
	‘Capitalist roaders’
	Bourgeois intellectuals

The second asserted the transformative power of 'raised political consciousness’ and correct ideology. It was possible also on this view to reverse the transformation with lowered consciousness as backsliding and coming to believe in incorrect ideas (for example becoming 'revisionist') occurred.

The CR never in fact resolved this tension of the two ideologies so that it persisted beyond Mao’s lifetime. Other theories of class, too, bubbled largely beneath the surface of the official orthodoxies and continue to do so within post-Mao China.