But some informants were older, some female, some from other regions of China, some emigrated legally, some had functioned as criticism targets or radical activists. Most of the informants were young Guangdong males who had been among the rank-and-file of the "revolutionary masses" (Red Guards or Revolutionary Rebels) and were then sent down to the countryside, whence they made illegal exits to Hong Kong in 1974–77. The minimal requirement in my selection was that the informant had lived through the Cultural Revolution. My thinking has benefited from conversations with Doak Barnett, Vic Falkenheim, Avery Goldstein, Harry Harding, Andrew Chalmers Johnson, Hong Yung Lee, and Robert Scalapino read the manuscript in its entirety and offered many useful comments and criticisms.
Responsibility for any errors of fact or judgment that remain I can of course share with no one, but I am deeply indebted to many for their invaluable help. It remains to be determined whether venue systematically biases informant samples or interview findings, now that it is becoming possible to conduct interviews in the PRC as well as Hong Kong. In view of the fact that she arrived at a more unambiguously damning verdict on the Cultural Revolution than I, it should be noted that her study was limited to "the perspective of those who were its victims " (emphasis added). Whereas I was unsuccessful in my attempts to replicate the interviews during a three-month sojourn in Beijing in 1982, Anne Thurston succeeded in conducting interviews there with thirty-four informants in 1981–82 on a comparable topic. Most were conducted with the help of a hired research assistant and compensation was provided to the informant at the then going rate. Each interview lasted a minimum of six hours (two three-hour sessions), beginning with a set protocol and pursuing interesting answers with follow-up questions more promising interviews were extended up to a hundred hours. A sample of convenience consisting of forty-eight émigrés was selected, forty-four of which were interviewed in Hong Kong in 1976–78, the remainder in the United States.
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In addition, chapters 4 and 6 rely on a series of interviews with recent émigrés from the People's Republic. Versity of California, and the Universities Service Center in Hong Kong. Most of the research was textual, consisting of the analysis of a wide array of documentary sources, gleaned from the contemporary China collections of the libraries of Columbia University, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, Stanford University, the Uni. Undoubtedly I bring my share of biases to the topic, but it would probably require psychoanalysis to discover and sort them out: my feelings are mixed. This task has preoccupied me for much of the past decade. But if the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only in the dusk of history, perhaps the time is now ripe to try to understand this epoch-making process. Perhaps this neglect may be attributed to the trees and forest illusion, or to the reluctance to tackle an issue in medias res. Yet if continuing the revolution has been taken seriously as a theoretical innovation, it has not hitherto attracted scholarly attention as a political phenomenon.
Even at this writing, the history of continuing revolution enlightens and obscures China's past, spurs and guides her present, haunts her future. Continuing revolution always took top priority on the political agenda by leadership consensus, and though this left ample room for disagreement over specific policy implications, it had a perceptible impact on the political atmosphere, at times seeming to make China the "spark" in an international class (or generation) war and generally giving her an international significance exceeding her economic or military capabilities. Emphasizing mobilization from below rather than Gleichschaltung from above, it also took a more ambivalent stance toward the material rewards of the revolution, amounting to a Marxist form of inner-worldly asceticism. The Chinese continuing revolution not only "telescoped" historical stages (as Trotsky and Lenin had) but in effect denied the tenets of stage theory and urged a melding of stages (resisting a means/ends division that deferred ends to a future utopia). The idea of a revolution that continues after sovereign power has been seized is not unique, but the Chinese attempt to realize this idea is distinctive from the Bolshevik attempt in a number of respects, and it has had an important and lasting impact on Chinese political development.