‘Politics First’

Summaries This article looks at the early period of Gordon White's engagement with China and the party?state. Gordon and Marc Blecher examined the impact of the Cultural Revolution on the politics of a basic level technical unit. They looked beyond the theatre and iconography of the Maoist project, with its personalisation of power and politicisation of society, to explain why the technical unit did not succumb to the ideological demands for a radical transformation.