On 24 January 1967, Mao Zedong renamed the Shanghai People's Commune
as the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee. These Revolutionary Committees (革命委员会), which were
supposedly based on a "three-way alliance of Red Guards, Party cadres
and army men", were to replace the original political structures that
had existed until then in China.
One of their main functions, however, was to bring the factional struggle to
an end that crippled the nation. The term "revolutionary committee" itself originated in the
Soviet Union, where it refered to a power structure which combined the
military and the state.
The formation of the revolutionary committees was
the result of the power seizures by rebel and Red Guard factions that had led to nation-wide administrative paralysis.
The introduction of the committees was a very slow process. Only
by 5 September 1968, almost a year and a half after their inception, the committees had been set up in all provinces,
municipalities and autonomous regions, "with the exception of Taiwan".
Although Mao himself had allowed that the committees were merely provisional
organs of power, they remained in existence until 1979, when they were
abolished and replaced by people's governments at all levels.
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The revolutionary committees were not merely
organizational tools that served political purposes. All work units,
from factories to schools, from workshops to rural communes, formed
their own revolutionary committees to take care of day-to-day
administration.
Sources:
Guo Jian, Yongyi Song & Yuan Zhou, Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Lanham, etc.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006)
Kwok-sing Li (editor) & Mary Lok (translator), A Glossary of Political Terms of the People's Republic of China (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press 1995)
Michael Schoenhals (ed.), China's Cultural Revolution, 1966-1969—Not A Dinner Party (Armonk NY: M.E Sharpe 1996)
Peter J. Seybolt, Throwing the Emperor from His Horse -- Portrait of a Village Leader in China, 1923-1995 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996)
Return to Cultural Revolution Campaigns 
s.r.landsberger@let.leidenuniv.nl
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