? ? ? ?Cambridge University Press?School of Oriental and African Studies ?http:/www.jstor.org/stable/653566 . ?Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms it can grow or diminish. The Chinese political system at the apex had much less power - less capacity to elicit compliance - than it had in 1966. To be sure, one can exaggerate the extent to which politics in Beijing by 1976 was an issueless struggle for power among top leaders. Factions did have substantive differences. For example, in 1972-73, Jiang Qing and her associates no doubt believed in the value of the Cultural Revolution and the social and political experiments it had spawned and sought to defend them, while Zhou Enlai and his supporters saw virtue in curtailing these experiments. Yet these differences were so obviously intertwined with power considerations that the outside observer cannot disentangle the relationship between ideological or value preferences and factional alignments. Further, it is inaccurate to assert that the top leaders functioned without any procedural rules at the end of Maos reign. To a residual extent, authority and prerogatives still did flow from the particular position an incumbent occupied. For example, rules governed the process by which directives (zhong-fa) of the Central Committee were drafted - what positions gave access to the drafting process.4 Top officials did not totally abide by the rules, to be sure, but their behaviour was constrained by them. In short, the policy process was not devoid of rules and norms upon Maos death nor did the struggle for power occur without serious reference to substantive issues. But as of mid-1976, the structure for power and the policy process did seem to be characterized by several principal features: First, the process remained vulnerable to the capricious intervention of one aged man, Mao Zedong, acting on his idiosyncratic impulses. Indeed, Mao had helped structure the system so that it would be responsive to him. Secondly, competing factional groupings, some in power, others on the sidelines, and yet others under arrest, sought access to Mao, and if obtained, sought to control and manipulate the Chairman. They struggled to achieve dominance over the major systems of power in China: the personnel system; the apparatus governing allocation of material goods, energy, and capital; the propaganda network; and the coercive apparatus of the military and the public security forces. Different factional groupings at the apex had their distinctive sources of power, based in different organizational hierarchies: Jiang Qing and her associates in the propaganda apparatus and a portion of the military (e.g. the 37th Army).5 Hua Guofeng, Wang Dongxing, and Ji Dengqui 4. Kenneth Lieberthal, Central Documents and Politburo Politics in China (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 1979). 5. Lowell Dittmer, “ Bases of power in Chinese politics,“ World Politics, Vol. XXI, No. 1 (October, 1978), pp. 26-60. This content downloaded from 202.189.100.44 on Wed, 9 Oct 2013 06:42:57 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsEconomic Policy Making in China: Summer 1981 seem to have had particular strength in the public security forces. The sidelined Deng Xiaoping had supporters among some of the military, in the economic apparatus, and in the organizational apparatus administering personnel. Chen Yun, Bo Yibo, and many others still under house arrest had latent but powerful ties with the economic apparatus and the organizational apparatus. Thirdly, chains or networks of personnel linked leaders in Beijing to provinces, counties and even basic level units (dan-wei). The cement holding these networks together was the Chinese concept of guan-xi, meaning a relationship or an interconnection. A sense of loyalty, mutual obligation, and, given the atmosphere of the times, shared vulnerability bound clusters of people together. A high-level official in Beijing was, in effect, the patron - the family head - of many clients, who in turn were patrons of lower-level clients. This general picture, of course, is overly simplistic, in that loyalties at any one moment could be felt toward more than one patron or toward competing clients. Over time, an official could move from one network to another. Perhaps it is more accurate therefore to speak of shifting constellations of officials in the capital, the provinces, and the lower levels, linked informally through guan-xi and formally through bureaucratic ties. Fourthly, factions in Beijing were not linked equally to all parts of the country. Rather, some factions had more intimate connections with certain cities, provinces, and lower levels, while other factions had their stre