militants.
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The political crisis presently unfolding in China is essentially a continuation of the cultural revolution, but in a different form. The underlying issues, the lineup of forces at the top, the list of charges leveled by the Maoists - all these are broadly speaking unchanged. Mao's 1966 prophecy that monsters and demons would "jump out" every seven or eight years has thus been fulfilled more or less on time, and the predictions of the bourgeois "China-watchers" have been confounded. And yet, many of the features of the present campaign appear to mark it off decisively from the earlier crisis. The present Maoist offensive represents the sudden sharpening of a struggle that has rumbled on almost continvously in the top leadership bodies of the party ever since the cultural revolution and has resulted in their repeated decimation. It was triggered by the death of Chou En-lai, whose polifical weight and talents as a mediator had previously maintained the balance between the competing factions in the leadership. Despite the polarizing effect of the cultural revolution, the complex pattern of individuals and political groupings in the Chinese Communist party (CCP) leadership still defies any simple classification. Nevertheless, for the purposes of the present analysis one can identify a broadly "radical" and a "conservative" faction. The "radical" faction rose to prominence during the cultural revolution and is the more homogeneous of the two. The more loosely defined "conservative" layer, with the "number two capitalist roader" Teng Hsiao-ping at its center, has tended to hold a more bureaucratic and institutionalizing view of the state. It would be just as
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