As Marx said, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. To understand where we are today, we need to go way back in time and approach history from the perspective of class analysis. How the mechanism for class mobility arose in China, and how that evolved into the deep bureaucracy of the modern Chinese state today.
And if one cannot understand that, one cannot understand why Mao felt the need for a Cultural Revolution. Remember that Mao himself claimed to have read Zizhi Tongjian for at least 17 times (!!), I’m sure he knows very well how the deep bureaucracy of the Chinese society works.
Please can you correct my understanding: Modern day China has a bureaucratic class, Mao has noted the tendency toward a new bureaucratic class, Ancient China had a bureaucratic class, we have not seen the system sustain itself without a cultural revolution.
While, yes, the bureaucratic tendency is real, are we not witnessing the system attempt to renew itself? We are having a discussion over an unsubstantiated article, all we know for sure is that they were removed as part of corruption investigations. We must simply wait and see.
That's fair, I was trying to engage with xhs's ideas.